In this episode, Stephanie Canizales of the University of California, Merced discusses her work talking to undocumented and unaccompanied youth workers in Los Angeles about their experiences and struggles with work and social integration in the United States.

Poverty Research & Policy

Stephanie Canizales on the Experiences of Undocumented and Unaccompanied Youth Workers

Mario Luis Small of Harvard University talks about social networks and social capital and about some of his work looking at those things in the context of programs like Head Start.

Mario Small on How Social Networks and Social Capital Matter for Human Services Programs

This episode features Professor Sarah Halpern-Meekin, who discusses work from her 2019 book, Social Poverty. Halpern-Meekin is a sociologist at UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology and La Follette School of Public Affairs.  

Sarah Halpern-Meekin on "Social Poverty"

In this episode, Peter Blair of Harvard University talks about a paper called “Job Market Signaling through Occupational Licensing” he wrote with Bobby Chung that looks at how licenses people need for jobs contribute to differences in pay and if the story is different depending on someone’s race or gender. He also talks about culture challenges in the economics profession, mentoring, and how growing up in the Bahamas influenced some of his goals as an economist.

Peter Blair on Occupational Licenses and What They Signal in the Job Market

We’ve all heard stories about the rise in helicopter parenting—parents who do their kids’ homework, drop off things at school for them that they’ve forgotten, and intervene to smooth the path for their children. It’s become so common that many schools now have rules against this kind of parental behavior. But our guest for this episode, sociologist Jessica Calarco of Indiana University, says that for many privileged parents and families, these rules just don’t seem to apply. She set out to find out why and tells us about it in this podcast episode.

Jessica Calarco on Parents and the Power of Privilege in Schools

For this episode, we hear from Angela Guarin about a paper she wrote with Lonnie Berger, Maria Cancian, and Dan Meyer that tries to understand how low-income noncustodial fathers who have children in more than one household make decisions when it comes to supporting their children. Guarin is a postdoctoral fellow at Los Andes University in Colombia and was a graduate research fellow at the Institute for Research on Poverty while earning her Ph.D. in social welfare at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Angela Guarin: Do Low-Income Noncustodial Fathers "Trade" Earlier Families for New Ones?

For this episode, we hear from Lars Højsgaard Andersen of Denmark’s Rockwool Foundation about a policy change in Denmark that aimed to increase employment among refugees to the country by reducing public benefits. The policy change brought a number of consequences — some intended, some not — that could inform similar policies being implemented in other countries.

Lars Højsgaard Andersen on the Consequences of Lowering Welfare Benefits for Migrants and Their Families

This episode features Michael Strain, the Economic Policy Director at the American Enterprise Institute, who gave a talk at IRP earlier this year titled “The American Dream isn’t Dead.” It’s a provocative title and Strain says that this line of work is growing out of concerns he has about the narrative around the American Dream.

Michael Strain: The American Dream Isn't Dead

In this episode, we hear from IRP postdoctoral scholar Leslie Hodges about the Unemployment Insurance program and how the program might mitigate economic distress, including poverty and material hardships, when someone loses a job. 

Leslie Hodges on Unemployment Insurance and Material Hardships

There has been renewed interest in issues facing the U.S. rural economy in recent years. In this episode, Penn State sociologist and demographer Brian Thiede breaks down some of the key changes that have taken place in the rural labor market and discusses potential policy responses to barriers to work faced by rural Americans. 

Brian Thiede on the Rural Economy and Barriers to Work in Rural America

In this episode, we hear from economists Aaron Sojourner and Matt Wiswall about the value of investments in quality child care and how we can think about tradeoffs when it comes to child care subsidies and related policies. 

Aaron Sojourner and Matt Wiswall on the Value of Investments in Quality Child Care

The idea of a universal basic income has been gaining traction in recent years, but we don’t have much evidence about what a large-scale universal basic income policy would do. In this episode, University of Chicago economist Damon Jones talks about the idea of a universal basic income and discusses a study he did with Ioana Marinescu that looked at the Alaska Permanent Fund to better understand the labor market effects of universal and permanent cash payments. 

Damon Jones on Whether a Modest Basic Income Might Lead People to Work Less

The concept of administrative burden focuses on how bureaucracy, complex paperwork, and confusing regulations can reduce the effectiveness of public programs and limit the rights of citizens. In this podcast episode, University of Chicago professor Marci Ybarra argues that research conducted in non-profit settings can introduce similar types of burdens by putting additional demands on those being served and on workers, and by changing the incentives for agencies themselves.  

Marci Ybarra on the Administrative Burdens of Research in Non-Profit Settings

In this episode, we hear from Walter Stern, an assistant professor in the History and Educational Policy Studies departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He discusses his recent book called Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City. His book, which focuses on the period from 1764-1960, looks at the role that schools played in the segregation of American cities with a particular focus on New Orleans.

Walter Stern on Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City

In this episode, Maria Cancian and Daniel Meyer discuss the Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration or CSPED, a large, eight state experiment that aimed to see if a different approach to child support could lead to better outcomes.  Over the course of the episode, they talk about how the CSPED project came to be, what it looked like for child support offices to change their approach to child support services for this demonstration, and what they learned. Cancian is the Dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and an affiliate and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty. Meyer is Professor of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an IRP affiliate.  

Maria Cancian and Dan Meyer on Final Results from the CSPED Impact Evaluation

The Poverty Research & Policy Podcast is produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) and features interviews with researchers about poverty, inequality, and policy in the United States.

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Poverty Research & Policy

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