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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.