Research

When Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences pointed to how he "improved the theoretical foundation for comparing different distributions of society's welfare and defined new, and more satisfactory, indexes of poverty" and "restored an ethnical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems." Sen's 1999 book, Development as Freedom, is essential reading for any one working on poverty and inequality and a great introduction to his ideas.

Sen's ideas have been influential in international circles—most notably, in the creation of the UN's Human Development Index—but they have yet to really take root in the United States. A new effort, the American Human Development Project, could change that. In mid-July, the project is releasing:

... the first-ever human development report for a wealthy, developed nation. It introduces the American Human Development Index, which provides a single measure of well-being for all Americans, disaggregated by state and congressional district, as well as by gender, race, and ethnicity. The Index rankings of the 50 states and 436 congressional districts reveal huge disparities in the health, education, and living standards of different groups.

According to the project:

Over 150 countries around the world have adapted [a Human Development Index] to analyze progress within their own countries, writing national Human Development Reports and calculating HD Indices for their own societies. But this approach has never been applied to the U.S. or any industrialized country.

Although the UN HDI has limitations (which hopefully will be addressed in the US report), it's a big improvement on conventional measures of well-being which typically focus on a single income measure. The next president would be wise to adopt a multi-dimensional measure like the American Human Development Index as the single most important measure of progress in the United States.

Based on the results of MDRC's latest evaluation, Career Academies should be getting a lot more attention. As described by MDRC, Career Academies:

Typically serv[e] between 150 and 200 students from grades 9 or 10 through grade 12 [and] are defined by three distinguishing features: (1) they are organized as small learning communities to create a more supportive, personalized learning environment; (2) they combine academic and career and technical curricula around a career theme to enrich teaching and learning; and (3) they establish partnerships with local employers to provide career awareness and work-based learning opportunities for students.

The new MDRC evaluation looks at the relatively long-term--eight years after high-school graduation--results of Career Academies, finding:

• The Career Academies produced sustained earnings gains that averaged 11 percent (or $2,088) more per year for Academy group members than for individuals in the non-Academy group — a $16,704 boost in total earnings over the eight years of follow-up (in 2006 dollars).
• These labor market impacts were concentrated among young men, a group that has experienced a severe decline in real earnings in recent years. Through a combination of increased wages, hours worked, and employment stability, real earnings for young men in the Academy group increased by $3,731 (17 percent) per year — or nearly $30,000 over eight years.
• Overall, the Career Academies served as viable pathways to a range of postsecondary education opportunities, but they do not appear to have been more effective than options available to the non-Academy group. More than 90 percent of both groups graduated from high school or received a General Educational Development (GED) certificate, and half completed a postsecondary credential.
• The Career Academies produced an increase in the percentage of young people living independently with children and a spouse or partner. Young men also experienced positive impacts on marriage and being custodial parents.

The only really disappointing finding is the lack of results for young women. It's not clear from evaluation why women didn't benefit:

.... The evaluation did not find evidence that the Career Academy experience was systematically different for young women than for young men. Nor does it appear that the Career Academies had systematically different impacts on the high school experiences of young women and young men. One hypothesis, however, is that the lack of post-high school labor market impacts for young women may be an artifact of their somewhat shorter and more intermittent employment spells associated with having children or attending postsecondary education programs. This will be explored in nonexperimental analyses to be presented in a future paper.

Although reports have focused on employment and earnings gains for young men, the results on "family formation" are even more striking. Students who attended Career Academies were 13 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than non-attendees. Young men who attended academies were 33 percent more likely to be married and living with their spouse than male non-attendees.

Some conservative marriage promoters have argued that the correlation between marriage and earnings in the general population is evidence that marriage directly causes higher earnings. The Career Academies evaluation suggests that the casual link moves in the opposite direction, with higher earnings leading to more stable families.

A new study finds working overtime is associated with anxiety and depression:

Employees who work overtime are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, according to a study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

Working overtime was associated with higher anxiety and depression scores among both men and women, particularly among workers on lower incomes and less-skilled workers, Elisabeth Kleppa from the University of Bergen in Norway found.

When analyzing the UK's child poverty target it is critically important to remember that it uses a relative measure. Poverty is set at 60 percent of median income. For the past decade, median incomes in the UK have risen above inflation. Reducing child poverty by 17 percent over 6 years, relative to a rising median is no small feat, and makes the UK’s efforts so very commendable. That the job is getting tricky in this economic and political climate is not surprising. With a reduction as dramatic as 17 percent, the message must have resounded with some segment of the electorate. But for a host of nuanced reasons, even jobless Brits are now more likely to give their vote to the Tories rather than to Labour. In most circles, this is viewed as “people just being tired of Labour,” a phenomenon we Americans tend to answer with the help of term limits and set election days, neither of which exist in the UK.

It’s undeniable though: since the Labour Government took power in 1997, the tide has raised all ships, and smaller boats have been towed closer to the fleet.

Having studied first hand the successes and challenges of British policies on social inclusion, I’ve been asked recently why my friends at inclusionist.org and I advocate so strongly for a relative poverty measure when “it’s not likely to happen”?

Here's my case:

1. We believe in a more inclusive society. We believe in a more inclusive society where our government, our public services, and our community-based organizations have the power to bring those who have been excluded back into the mainstream of society. The only way to know if this is happening is to take a social-inclusion approach that measures against what’s happening in the middle, and whether the gaps between excluded groups and the whole of society are narrowing.

2. We’ve got the political capital, and we can build the political will. We’re enthusiastic, hopeful and ready to demand a little extra from the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, and, c’mon – let’s start to believe it – a progressive president. To poverty and social inclusion analysts across the nation, we ask: “When is a relative measure of poverty more likely to happen?”

3. We don’t have to wait for the government to do it. There are some very encouraging poverty and child poverty campaigns that are building momentum in New Mexico, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut, to name a few. To achieve at least a smidgen of the success that the UK has achieved, they’ll need to start by re-conceptualizing their state’s notion of poverty by identifying the state’s median income and measuring from there.

Conventional measurements of 100 percent or 200 percent of the official poverty line are more easily calculated and sold, but it’s not really the smart policy we’re capable of developing. Without a true relative measure, we’re stuck in the same old school ideas that haven’t taken us as far as we might go. Generating ideas independent of government—isn’t that what America is bloody about?

(This guest post by Natalie Branosky of the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion (CESI is a UK think tank, but Natalie is from the U.S.) was originally written as a comment on Shawn Fremstad's post about Kate Stanley's recent Guardian op-ed on the UK's poverty reduction goal. The Editors.)

Via Economist's View, this is from an interesting interview with economist Christopher Ruhm, who has done extensive research on work-life issues, including parental leave:

... I found ... that in the presence of parental leave requirements, women were more likely to be employed. There are a lot of reasons why you would expect that to be true. The most obvious one is the notion of job protection. If you don't have to quit your job to take leave, careers outside of the home become more attractive to women.

It's not entirely obvious, however, that it had to work that way. You can imagine the opposite outcome. Employers might have been encouraged to discriminate against women because women are more likely to actually take the leave, for instance. But there was pretty strong evidence that you did find increased employment-to-population ratios for mothers — a larger percentage of mothers became employed. Yet, I also found that if the leaves got sufficiently long, there was some possible negative effect on wages. In some European countries, you're talking about leave lengths that can equal a few years.

....

I used the same dataset and I looked at health outcomes for children, mainly infant mortality rates — deaths in the first year. I also looked at neonatal fatalities, which is death of the baby in the first 30 days, versus post-neonatal fatalities, which is death in the rest of the first year. Then I extended the analysis out to age 5.

The results were quite striking and consistent with what I would have expected. In the first 30 days, you didn't see much of a reduction in infant mortality, most likely because neonatal deaths are unrelated to how much leave the parents are taking after the birth. It has more to do with what type of hospital care you're getting or whether the baby is born with a congenital defect of some kind. But in the post-neonatal period and after that, you see reductions in infant mortality correlated with parental leave mandates.

The main findings from a new EPI briefing paper on income volatility by Jacob Hacker and Elisabeth Jacobs:

The instability of family incomes has risen substantially over the last three decades. Although the precise magnitude of the increase depends on the approach to measuring income variance that is used, we estimate that short-term family income variance essentially doubled from 1969-2004. Much of the rise in income volatility occurred prior to 1985, and volatility dropped substantially in the late 1990s. It has, however, risen in recent years to exceed its 1980s peak.

The proportion of working-age individuals experiencing a large drop in their family income (50% or greater) has climbed more steadily—from less than 4% in the early 1970s to nearly 10% in the early 2000s. The probability of large income drops varies predictably with the business cycle. Yet it has also trended strongly upward over time. For instance, the 2001 recession, which was mild in macroeconomic terms, was associated with a higher chance of large income drops than the recession of the early 1980s, which was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

There is an important distinction between family income (total earnings, asset income, and transfer income for all members of a family) and individual earnings. While the instability of individual male workers' earnings rose sharply between the 1970s and 1980s, it has been more or less stable since then, trending up and down with the business cycle through the 1980s and 1990s, and rising again in the early 2000s. This basic trend—a rise in earnings variability in the 1970s, little clear trend from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and an upswing in the early 2000s—has been confirmed by numerous analyses, including a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Moreover, this same basic pattern can be seen in data from both the survey-based Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) (which is used in this brief) and the administratively collected Continuous Work History Sample (CWHS) of the Social Security Administration (used by the CBO).

Contrary to assertions in the popular press, women's increased workforce participation has not been a major factor contributing to the rise in family income volatility. Female earnings have, if anything, become more stable since the 1980s. Male workers have experienced a larger and more sustained rise in earnings instability. Because men's earnings account for a larger percentage of total household income than do women's earnings, on average, rising instability in male earnings helps account for the increase in family income volatility. In short, the stabilizing influence on family income of the decrease in female earnings instability is overwhelmed by the rise in men's earnings instability.

In addition to the increase in male earnings variability, other likely causes of rising family income volatility include the growing variability of cash transfers and the limited cushioning effect of having a second earner in the household. Although the evidence is limited, there is reason to believe that a second family earner is less of a benefit in terms of income protection today than it was prior to the 1990s. Indeed, in 2004, if a male worker's earnings fell, on average his spouse's earnings fell as well, exacerbating, rather than offsetting, the loss.

While less educated and poorer Americans have less-stable family incomes than their better-educated and wealthier peers, the increase in family income volatility affects all major demographic and economic groups. Indeed, Americans with at least four years of college experienced a larger increase in family income instability than those with only a high-school education over the past generation, with most of the rise occurring in the last 15 years.

Finally, levels of family income volatility appear to be extremely high. Family income drops of 50% or greater affected nearly one in 10 non-elderly adults during the early 2000s. Meanwhile, earnings in the United States are also quite variable. The CBO's recent analysis of earnings variance using the CWHS suggests that around 15% of workers experience a drop in their earnings of 50% or greater every year—a level comparable to what we find using the PSID.

Via Economist's View, an interesting 2006 paper on the minimum wage and firm profitability. According to EV, the paper:

finds evidence that the minimum wage transfers income from owners to workers, i.e. that it reduces profit and increases wages, but it does not change the probability of a firm going out of business, and it does not reduce employment. Thus, this paper raises the possibility that an increase in the minimum wage reduces inequality without having much of an impact on aggregate activity or employment.

Larry Bartels' new book, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, is full of fascinating insights into the politics of inequality. I hope to do a longer post on the book at some point, but until then, wanted to share one of Bartels' conclusions:

Scholars of political participation and liberal activists often seem to suppose that the cure for political inequality is to educate and mobilize the disadvantaged in support of specific progressive policies. However, the evidence of unresponsiveness to the views of low-income citizens presented in chapter 9 [of Bartel's book] and in [Martin] Gilen's work suggests that that strategy is very unlikely to be politically effective. ....

If "voice" is "likely to be futile" for people on the losing end of economic inequality, is there any hope for progress? My analysis points to two related bright spots in an otherwise gloomy picture. First, the correlation between class positions and political views is not so substantial that support for egalitarian policies is limited to "those mired in poverty." ....

[Second], my analyses suggest that the specific policy views of citizens, whether rich or poor, have less impact in the policy-making process than the ideological convictions of elected officials. .... policy choices seem to depend more on the partisan ideologies of key policy makers than on the details of public opinion. Thus, even if poor people have negligible direct influence on the day-to-day decisions of elected officials, they--and their ideological allies--may have substantial indirect influence by altering the balance of power between Democrats and Republicans in the making of public policy.

In essence, reducing poverty and inequality will require more progressives in positions of power. Yet, modern-day anti-poverty advocacy is largely legislative advocacy, advocacy conducted by groups funded by non-partisan and mostly non-ideological foundations. As political scientist Andrew Rich has noted:

... the leaders of liberal think tanks are often preoccupied by deeply held commitments to producing objective research, on the one hand, and to connecting their work to issue-based grassroots activism, on the other hand. These commitments are compatible with the tenets of liberal ideology, but they are far less helpful to fighting a war of ideas.

This dominant liberal approach has met with limited success over the last few decades. Bartels' research helps to explain why.

According to a new ad campaign sponsored by the Baltimore-based Campaign for Our Children (CFOC) and apparently funded in part with public dollars, married people "earn more" and have smarter kids. According to CFOC's website:

The campaign’s core message is a practical, added-value approach that can be summed up in just two words: Marriage Works.

....

Using available research – and there’s plenty of it – we explain the benefits of marriage in fact-based, no-nonsense ways that teens and adults can understand and respond to. And as the facts demonstrate, the benefits of marriage are compelling and far-reaching.

With focused, persuasive television and radio commercials, billboards, bus shelter ads and a web presence, Marriage Works drives home the practical benefits of matrimony.

CFOC argues that "research suggests that children do best when two parents who have a healthy marriage raise them." However, their ads drop the "healthy" part in favor of a simplistic "marriage good" message. Moreover, there's no consensus among researchers on whether higher levels of well-being in married families are due to marriage itself or to other unmeasured factors. If it's the latter, marriage promotion efforts could actually reduce child well-being (both directly by encouraging couples to marry who would be better off unmarried, and indirectly, by stigmatizing children of unmarried parents). A new working paper finds evidence to support this less sanguine conclusion:

... [our] estimates suggest that unobserved factors rather than a causal effect drive the negative relationship between never-married motherhood and child outcomes for blacks and Hispanics, at least for the children of women whose marriage decisions are most affected by variation in incarceration rates for men. For Hispanics, in particular, we find evidence that these children may actually be better off living with a never-married mother.

In their lit review, the authors cite additional recent research suggesting that the impact of marriage on child well-being may vary by socio-economic status.

Another simplistic claim made in the CFOC ads is that "married people earn more." Here, again, recent research suggests things aren't so simple. According to a summary of some of this research by Justin Wolfers:

... Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschenes ... find that divorce actually led women to live in households with greater income per person. ....

And Ananat and Michaels agree, finding similar effects. They then slice and dice this surprising finding, concluding that divorce may raise incomes on average, but it leads some women to lower incomes, and some to higher incomes. Those who gain tend to be in a (slight) minority, but they tend to gain more, which explains the rise in average income.

In short, there is strong evidence that the decisions couples make to dissolve their unions (or not enter into them in the first place) are often beneficial. In the best interests of children, CFOC would be wise to discontinue ads that provide a partial and misleading picture of the evidence on this score.

In an important new report, CEPR's John Schmitt and Dean Baker detail the likely impacts of a recession on unemployment and poverty:

A recession that is mild-to-moderate by recent historical standards would be formally over in six to nine months (as was the case of the early 1990s and early 2000s downturns); a recession that is severe by recent historical standards would last about two years (the total number of months in recession during the 1980-82 "double-dip" downturn). Based on the experience of the last three recessions, however, the labor-market recession would last between three years (the length of the labor-market recession in the early 1990s and early 2000s recessions) and four years (the length of the labor-market recession in the severe recession of the early 1980s).

If the next recession follows the pattern set by the three most recent downturns, a recession in 2008 would raise the national unemployment rate by between 2.1 (a mild-to-moderate recession) and 3.8 percentage points (a severe recession along the lines of the early 1980s), increasing the number of unemployed Americans by between 3.2 million and 5.8 million. Based on the historical pattern, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed would continue to increase through 2010 (to 6.7 percent in the case of a mild-to-moderate recession) or 2011 (to 8.4 percent in the case of a more severe economic downturn).

Critics of new spending on public infrastructure as part of an anti-recession plan have argued that it isn't timely enough to have a "stimulative" effect on the economy. Whether or not that is the case, the Schmitt/Baker report is an important reminder that anti-recession policies need to be about more than putting money into consumers' hands over the next three months; the effects of even mild recessions are long-lasting, and short-term thinking and policies by themselves aren't adequate to address them.

PS: The NYT Editorial Board's Blog has a nice post summarizing the CEPR paper.

Ben Zipperer and John Schmitt on the today's BLS report on unionization:

For the first time in the past quarter of a century, in 2007 U.S. unions increased their share of membership among workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) annual union membership report released today. Unions added about 310,000 members last year, raising the unionized share of the workforce to 12.1 percent from 12.0 percent in 2006.

The increase is small, and may well reflect statistical variation rather than an actual increase in the union membership share, but the uptick is striking because it is the first time since the BLS began collecting annual union membership rates in 1983 that the union share has increased.

....

Even if the increase is a statistical blip, it seems at a minimum that we've finally hit bottom on unionization, and as Big Audio Dynamite sang in the best non-blues song ever written about economic decline: "when you hit the bottom line, the only thing to do is climb ...."

In her lead essay, Stephanie Coontz reviews the evolution of marriage, and draws these two lessons:

First, marriage is not on the verge of extinction. Most cohabiting couples eventually do get married, either to each other or to someone else. New groups, such as gays and lesbians, are now demanding access to marriage — a demand that many pro-marriage advocates oddly interpret as an attack on the institution. And a well-functioning marriage is still an especially useful and effective method of organizing interpersonal commitments and improving people’s well-being. But in today’s climate of gender equality and personal choice, we must realize that successful marriages require different traits, skills, and behaviors than in the past.

.... Today, men rank intelligence and education way above cooking and housekeeping as a desirable trait in a partner. A recent study by Paul Amato et al. found that the chance of divorce recedes with each year that a woman postpones marriage, with the least divorce-prone marriages being those where the couples got married at age 35 or higher. Educated and high-earning women are now less likely to divorce than other women. When a wife takes a job today, it works to stabilize the marriage. Couples who share housework and productive work have more stable marriages than couples who do not, according to sociologist Lynn Prince Cooke. And the Amato study found that husbands and wives who hold egalitarian views about gender have higher marital quality and fewer marital problems than couples who cling to more traditional views.

So there is no reason to give up on building successful marriages — but we won’t do it by giving people outdated advice about gender roles. We may be able to bring the divorce rate down a little further — but since one method of doing that is to get more people to delay marriage, this will probably lead to more cohabitation. We may also be able to reverse last year’s uptick in teen births and return to the downward course of the late 1990s and first few years of the 21st century — but not by teaching abstinence-only to young people who if they do delay marriage are almost certainly going to have sex beforehand.

The second lesson of history is that the time has passed when we can construct our social policies, work schedules, health insurance systems, sex education programs — or even our moral and ethical beliefs about who owes what to whom — on the assumption that all long-term commitments and care-giving obligations should or can be organized through marriage. Of course we must seek ways to make marriage more possible for couples and to strengthen the marriages they contract. But we must be equally concerned to help couples who don’t marry become better co-parents, to help single parents and cohabiting couples meet their obligations, and to teach divorced parents how to minimize their conflicts and improve their parenting.

The right research and policy question today is not “what kind of family do we wish people lived in?” Instead, we must ask “what do we know about how to help every family build on its strengths, minimize its weaknesses, and raise children more successfully?” Much recent hysteria to the contrary, we know a lot about how to do that. We should devote more of our energies to getting that research out and less to fantasizing about a return to a mythical Golden Age of marriage of the past.

Also worth reading is Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers essay on Marriage and the Market:

So what drives modern marriage? We believe that the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption. In case the language of economic lacks romance, let’s be clearer: modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better shared with another person: this ranges from the simple pleasures such as enjoying a movie or a hobby together, to shared social ties such as attending the same church, and finally, to the joint project of bringing up children. Returning to the language of economics, the key today is consumption complementarities-activities that are not only enjoyable, but are more enjoyable when shared with a spouse. We call this new model of sharing our lives “hedonic marriage”.

....

Many have cited high and rising divorce rates as pointing to the collapse of the family, and Kay Hymowitz’s essay reprises these themes. Yet the high divorce rates among those marrying in the 1970s reflected a transition, as many married the right partner for the old specialization model of marriage, only to find that pairing hopelessly inadequate in the modern hedonic marriage.

In his book The Great Risk Shift, Yale political scientist documented an increase in the volatility of household income. Recent CBO research finds considerable earnings volatility (although no increase over time), and lower levels of household income volatility (again, with no increase over time). Hacker has posted a lengthy response on his web site. Of particular note, is this synthesis of recent research on volatility:

Indeed, it is possible to sum up the findings of the existing studies, including my analyses in The Great Risk Shift and the work with Elisabeth Jacobs reported in our forthcoming EPI brief, in a series of fairly simple observations:

The instability of family incomes has risen substantially over the last three decades. Much of the rise in income volatility occurred prior to 1985, and volatility dropped substantially in the late 1990s. But it has risen in recent years to exceed its 1980s peak.

The proportion of working-age individuals experiencing a large drop in their family income (50 percent or greater) has climbed more steadily, rising (in our analyses) from around 3 to 4 percent in the early 1970s to roughly 7 to 9 percent in the early 2000s. The probability of large income drops varies predictably with the business cycle. Yet it has also trended strongly upward over time. For instance, the 2001 recession, which was fairly mild in macroeconomic terms, was associated with a higher chance of large income drops than the recession of the early 1980s.

There is an important distinction between family income (total earnings, asset income, and transfer income for all members of a family) and individual earnings. While the instability of individual workers’ earnings rose sharply between the 1970s and 1980s, it has been more or less stable since then, trending up and down with the business cycle through the 1980s and 1990s. However, individual workers’ earnings instability appears to have risen in the early 2000s. This basic trend—a rise in earnings variability in the 1970s, little clear trend from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and an upswing in the early 2000s—has been confirmed by numerous analyses, including a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office. Moreover, this same basic pattern can be seen in data from both the survey-based Panel Study of Income Dynamics (which we use in this brief) and the administratively-collected Continuous Work History Sample of the Social Security Administration (used by the CBO).

Contrary to assertions in the popular press, women’s increased workforce participation has not been a major factor contributing to the rise in family income volatility. Female earnings have, if anything, become somewhat more stable since the 1980s. Male workers have experienced a larger and more sustained rise in earnings instability. And because men’s earnings account for a larger percentage of total household income than do women’s earnings, on average, rising instability in male earnings helps account for the increase in family income volatility. In short, the stabilizing influence on family income of the decrease in female earnings instability is overwhelmed by the rise in men’s earnings instability.

In addition to the increase in male earnings variability, other likely causes of rising family income volatility include the growing variability of cash transfers and the limited cushioning effect of having a second earner in the household. Although the evidence is limited, early analyses suggest that a second family earner is less of a benefit in terms of income protection today than it was prior to the 1990s.

Finally, while less educated and poorer Americans have less stable family incomes than their better-educated and wealthier peers, the increase in family income volatility appears to have affected all major demographic and economic groups—and, indeed, looks most sharp among college-educated Americans in recent years.

From economist Emmanuel Saez, this is a good summary of his work on long-term trends in inequality in the United States. Saez uses tax records to go all they way back to 1913, and finds, among other things, an extraordinary increase in the share of income in the United States taken in by the top 1% (incomes about $150,000). The top 1% now capture about the same share of national income as they in the years preceding the Great Depression.

Saez's piece appears in Pathways, a new magazine on poverty, inequality, and social policy put out by the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality that looks worth reading.

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For corrections, comments, or additions, please contact: sarahsattelmeyer (at) mobilityagenda (dot) org









Politics, Poverty, Immigration Entangle Texas Health Care (12/4/2007)
by Jason Roberson, The Dallas Morning News
Texas lawmakers voted to increase funding for Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program but rejected a more comprehensive reform proposed by grassroots coalitions and healthcare think tanks. This article explores the complexity of the issue and how immigration, economic insecurity, and Texas's political leadership have affected the debate.

A Health Plan for Wal-Mart: Less Stinginess (11/13/2007)
by Michael Barbaro and Reed Abelson, The New York Times
Wal-Mart, the nation's largest employer has improved its insurance coverage for many of its workers due to pressure from state legislatures and subsequent damage to its reputation and ability to expand.

Employer-Provided Insurance Continues to Decline (11/12/2007)
by Julie Appleby, USA Today
This USA Today article highlights the growing numbers of uninsured workers and introduces policy proposals to increase coverage.

Gimme Coverage: Health Care Special Report (June 2007)
by Alan Greenblatt, Governing Magazine
This report focuses on states’ increased efforts to provide universal healthcare to their residents. It covers the success of Washington State and Massachusetts as, the change in political discourse, and the challenges in federal law.

Health Care Policy in Illinois (January 2007)
by John Bouman, Shriver National Center on Poverty Law
Bouman presented the growing healthcare concerns for Illinois at The Mobility Agenda’s Chicago Roundtable. He also explains the work of the Adequate Health Care Task Force and recommends the future approaches to expand healthcare coverage.

Progressive States' Stateside Dispatch: Health Care in 2007 (January 29, 2007)
by Progressivestates.org
The Progressivestates.org website is a clearinghouse for news on progressive state legislation. This webpage focuses on states’ efforts in healthcare, a growing concern for 2007, and it goes into detail on specific state policies.

State Strategies to Expand Health Insurance Coverage: Trends and Lessons for Policymakers (January 2007)
by Alice Burton, Isabel Friedenzohn, and Enrique Martinez-Vidal, The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System
This paper summarizes the State of the States 2007: Building Hope, Raising Expectations, an annual report of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s State Coverage Initiative. In it, state approaches to increase insurance coverage are discussed and federally-supported state experimentation is encouraged as a promising way to make progress.

State Launches New Health Insurance Program for Poorest Residents (10/2/2006)
by Steve LeBlanc, Associated Press
Massachusetts initiated its health insurance program, which qualifies its poorest residents for free coverage as part of Massachusetts’ goal of state required health insurance. This article explains the program and the controversy that was generated over the law, which may leave as many as 40,000 children without coverage.

'Wal-Mart Law' in Md. Rejected by Court (7/20/2006)
by Matthew Mosk and Ylan Q. Mui, Washington Post
A Maryland law requiring businesses that employ more than 10,000 workers to provide at least eight percent of their payroll on health coverage was overturned by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz. Motz found the law to be a federal issue and overturned the legislation, alarming labor unions, health care advocates, and the Maryland public.

San Francisco Oks Universal Health Plan (7/19/2006)
by Lisa Leff, Associated Press
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a plan to provide health coverage for all residents regardless of immigration or employment status and would be financed by local government, mandatory employer contributions, and income-adjusted premiums.