Browsing by Subject "Poverty"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 28
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    American Indians in St Paul: A Preliminary Data Report
    (2000) Fitzgerald, Patricia; Martinez, Cecilia
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    At Odds with Progress: An Analysis of Minnesota's Municipal Tax Legislation, Metro-Area Fiscal Control, and the Taxpayer's Income Conundrum, 2003-2012
    (2017-02) McDaniel, Benjamin
    In recent decades, cities in the Twin Cities Metro Area have been struggling to balance their budgets to meet their taxpayer’s demand for services. Some state legislators and scholars have long presumed that these problems are the product of the revenue-generating inequalities between individual cities, but this study argues that the problems cities face in generating tax revenues are the product of an increasingly unequal distribution of income between taxpayers.
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    Baltimore's urban fix: sounds of excess and exclusion in Station north
    (2013-03) Kotting, Jennifer
    This research seeks to tell a different kind of story about urban development, attentive to the details of everyday life that are often ignored by both supporters and critics of such projects. The case study of Station north is an immediately relevant project meant to improve the city as a whole by attracting capital investment. However, the social and political contradictions involved show the devastating consequences of a spatial fix for an urban neighborhood. Mapping neighborhood change is common, but using sound and digital mapping to evoke under-explored parts of everyday life is less typical in the field of urban studies.
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    Building Family Wealth Project: A Review of the Literature.
    (Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 2006) Hofer, Eric; Davis, Elizabeth E.
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    Dilemmas of political representation: antipoverty advocacy in the Post-Civil Rights Era
    (2014-04) Forrest, Michael David
    Dilemmas of Political Representation examines how urban antipoverty organizations in particular and advocacy organizations in general work as alternative sites of representation for marginalized interests. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, it raises and addresses two interrelated sets of questions about these organizations' efforts, both of which also index broader concerns about the practice of democratic representation. The first set of questions is about how advocates use their representational efforts to articulate and disseminate different constructions of their constituents' interests: What are the different types of constructions that they use? How do they actually fashion these constructions? And how, in the process, do they construct themselves as legitimate representatives of the resulting interests? The second set of questions is about the challenges that advocates face as they represent and construct their constituents' interests: What are the sources and contours of these challenges? How do advocates negotiate them? And how, in the process, do their efforts aid and/or limit the struggle for equality in the post-civil rights United States? The dissertation traces how and with what consequences advocates organize their efforts and respond to their challenges through organizing meetings, internal communications, and public actions. In doing so, it advances theoretical discussions about the promise and dilemmas of democratic representation and advocacy on behalf of the urban poor and other marginalized groups.
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    Effectiveness of Education Reform Initiatives within the Context of Poverty
    (2015) Spehar, Thomas John; Pepelnjak, Erin; Williams, Julia
    Practical “education reform” in school districts across the county has focused on the system of education comprised of education leaders, teachers, parents and the students. While the system appears to be full of activity called reform, progress has been slow or non-existent in increasing success. This study examines education reform activities within a larger school district in Northern Minnesota by surveying elementary classroom teachers on what they believe are those factors influencing student achievement.
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    Emotion Regulation and Socialization in the Context of Cumulative Risk: Social-Emotional Adjustment in Children Experiencing Homelessness
    (2018-08) Labella, Madelyn
    The acquisition of emotion regulation skills is a key developmental task, largely socialized by caregivers, that lays the foundation for healthy social-emotional adjustment. Unfortunately, both parental socialization and children’s self-regulation are disrupted in contexts of high cumulative risk. The current dissertation evaluated emotion regulation and socialization during observed parent-child interaction as predictors of social-emotional adjustment in young children experiencing homelessness. Study 1 used linear regression and latent profile analysis to identify links among child reactivity and regulation, parental affect profiles, and teacher-reported adjustment in the context of risk and adversity. Children’s difficulty down-regulating anger during parent-child interaction was linked to more teacher-reported social-behavioral problems. Empirically-derived profiles of parent affect were related to child behavior during the interaction and in the classroom: the minority of parents showing elevated anger had children who were observed to struggle with anger down-regulation and were reported by teachers to have more social-behavioral problems at school. Sociodemographic risk additionally predicted more social-behavioral problems, controlling for child and parent anger expression. Study 2 built on these findings using dynamic structural equation modeling to investigate dyadic interplay between parent and child anger across the problem-solving discussion. Parents and children showed significant stability in anger from one interval to the next, as well as cross-lagged associations consistent with bidirectional feedback processes and significant novel anger reactivity. Individual differences in child anger stability were related to more social-behavioral problems at school. More observed anger contagion, particularly from child to parent, predicted more parent-reported externalizing problems, as did higher family adversity. Results are interpreted in light of theory and research and future directions are discussed.
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    Episode 10: Examining Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence in the US
    (2017-12-13) Goetz, Ed; Conners, Kate
    "Contemporary federal housing policy in the United States has largely focused on racially segregated areas with high levels of poverty, known as racially concentrated areas of poverty (RCAPs). In this podcast, Ed Goetz, professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, examines the other side of this dynamic—concentrated areas of white affluence. Goetz, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, discusses his work to identify and understand racially concentrated areas of affluence (RCAAs). ""When we started our study, we were actually responding to advocates for low income communities who maintained that this single-minded focus on their communities problematized their communities, stigmatized their communities, and ignored the other half of the segregation formula—which is of course the ability and tendency of white people to seclude themselves into neighborhoods,"" says Goetz. ""So we tried to look at the other side of the coin."""
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    Episode 14: Sex Trafficking and Community Wellbeing
    (2018-01-26) Martin, Lauren; Conners, Kate
    In this podcast, Lauren Martin, director of research at the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement Center (UROC) and affiliate faculty member of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, addresses sex trafficking and commercial sex, defining their differences and dispelling myths. When it comes to the relationship between sex trafficking and mega sporting events, an issue that drew increased attention as Minnesota prepared to host the big game, Martin notes​ that​ "it's not that there's no impact, it's that the impact is akin to any large event."
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    Episode 3: Predatory Criminal Justice Practices
    (2017-02-07) Soss, Joe; Conners, Kate
    In March 2015, Americans learned from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that the city of Ferguson, Missouri had been operating a "predatory system of government." Police officers were acting as street-level enforcers for a program—aggressively promoted by city officials—in which fines and fees were used to extract resources from poor communities of color and deliver them to municipal coffers. In this talk, Joe Soss, professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, argues that what the DOJ discovered in Ferguson should not be seen as anomalous, either in relation to U.S. history or contemporary American governance. Based on an ongoing book project with Joshua Page, Soss offers a political analysis of the origins, operations, and consequences of revenue-centered criminal justice practices that have grown dramatically in the U.S. since the 1990s. Under this policy regime, local governments and market firms draw substantial revenue streams from fine-centered policing, court fees, bail systems, prison charges, civil asset forfeiture, and much more.
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    Essays on economic growth, education, and the distribution of income: a structural analysis for the case of South Africa.
    (2010-05) Badibanga, Thaddée Mutumba
    Since the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, the democratically elected post-Apartheid governments have engaged in social and economic reforms aimed at improving welfare of millions of the left offs during this regime and at enhancing economic growth. Among these reforms, the most important have consisted of achieving structural transformation of the South African economy through technology advancements, improving skills by investing massively in human capital through education and training, reducing income inequality across racial groups through access to programs that facilitate the acquisition of skills by the left offs of the Apartheid rather than through massive income redistribution, liberalizing the labor markets and the formation of labor unions, privatizing statal and para-statal corporations and abolishing monopolies in public services, liberalizing trade and capital movements, promoting new investment through tax incentives, promoting private initiative, reducing or at least freezing government expenditures, reducing poverty, and so on. In this dissertation, we analyze the relationship between growth and a few of issues targeted by the aforementioned reforms through two separate essays. In the first essay (Essay 1), we analyze the growth and welfare effects of public spending on education in the post-Apartheid South Africa; while in the second essay (Essay 2), we investigate the dynamics of income inequality, poverty, and growth in the post-Apartheid South Africa. Starting with the first essay (Essay 1), South Africa has launched since the abolition of its Apartheid regime in 1994, a massive program of education and training, which has been financed through resources representing annually and on average 21% of the national budget or 7% of GDP. Today, the GDP share of public spending on education is 1.3 times the average of industrialized countries (5.4%) and almost twice that of developing countries (3.9%). In this essay (Essay 1), we simulate fiscal policy experiments to analyze the growth and welfare effects of a reduction in or an elimination of spending on education in a model of endogenous growth with human capital accumulation and policies for the Post Apartheid South African economy. The first and second experiments consist of reducing the GDP share of educational spending to the averages of industrialized and developing countries, respectively; while the third experiment consists of eliminating government in the educational sector (a 100% tax cut), respectively. The results of the simulations demonstrate in all instances that a reduction in or an elimination of educational spending does affect negatively the long run as well as the transition rates of growth of per capita GDP, wage of skilled workers as well as welfare. Further, the effects on the other variables in the economy (physical capital, human capital, labor, consumption, and the interest rate) vary across experiments. Nonetheless, these growth and welfare effects are small. Turning now on to the second essay (Essay 2), we construct a model of growth with heterogeneity in asset holdings and skills and solve it numerically to the Post-Apartheid South African economy to analyze the dynamics of income distribution, income inequality, poverty, and growth. We find that growth is achieved at all levels of incomes and poverty is totally eliminated by the end of the process, which last 73 years (from 1993 to 2065). Furthermore, the economy achieves the overall convergence noticeable through the improvement in the relative positions of poor consumers in the distribution of wealth as well as in that of income and the worsening of those of rich consumers. Next, we combine the results of the heterogeneous model with the microeconomic data (the South Africa's 1996 October Household Survey) to estimate the distributions of income and analyze thoroughly the interaction between growth, income inequality, and poverty. We find that a one percent increase in the rate of growth of income causes on average poverty to drop by 3.7% at the $2 per day poverty line and by 1.3% at the $1 per day poverty line. Moreover, growth causes overall decline in income inequality but the effect is very small. A one percent-increase in the rate of growth of income results on average in a decline in income inequality of only 0.056% by the Gini coefficient and of 0.11% by the Global Theil index.
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    Essays on Intra-Household Decision-Making and Poverty Transfers
    (2020-06) Casco Guerra, Jose
    This dissertation studies the effects of poverty transfer policies on the behavior of households. Chapter 1, studies how different types of households determine adult members’ allocations of time and consumption. Household types are characterized by the presence of partner violence and cash transfers. Using a collective intra-household decision making model, together with data from an experimental evaluation of a cash transfer program in Ecuador, I structurally estimate the parameters of the model. Then, I perform a poverty analysis at the individual level for the different types of households and find that women are substantially poorer than men, and that income distribution is more unequal for women than it is for men. I also find that the policy intervention generated welfare gains in terms of reducing overall and individual poverty. However, these welfare gains are heterogeneous among the different types of households. Particularly, I find that transfers are effective in reducing the gender poverty gap mainly in households where there is no violence. Finally, I estimate indifference scales for the different types of households to measure how much income an individual living alone needs to have in order to be as well off as when living as a couple. I find that men need a higher share of initial household resources compared to women, and that indifference scales for women decrease with violence and increase when the household is a beneficiary of the transfer. This work contributes to understanding how intra-household allocation of resources takes place among different types of households, the importance of gender difference in poverty and inequality, and the effectiveness of poverty policies when there are factors that generate inequality in consumption. Chapter 2 analyzes how exogenous changes in household income coming from a cash transfer program alter the bargaining power of the recipient and the allocation of time within the family. Using a large-scale living standards measurement survey from Ecuador, I am able to implement a fuzzy regression discontinuity by exploiting the government mechanisms to assign beneficiaries of the program. Then, I examine the impact the cash transfer has on women’s and men’s hours of paid work, housework, community activities and leisure, as well as whether resource transfers to women through BDH program are in fact effective in improving women’s positions within the household, as measured by several questions about decision-making power. I find that the conditional cash transfer program affects the women’s freedom to decide (bargaining power) as well as women’s time allocation to certain activities. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of a cash transfer on the household decisions regarding child activities (schooling, work, leisure), and the allocation of hours towards working activities. For this analysis, I use data from a randomized evaluation of a conditional cash transfer program in Ecuador. The empirical results suggest that the most prevalent behavioral shift caused by the program was a reduction in the probability that the household decide only sending the child to work, an increase in the probability that the household chooses concurrently work and school, and an increase in the likelihood that a household chooses schooling only for the child. Moreover, these effects are heterogeneous among boys and girls. On the other hand, the transfer reduced the allocation of time to certain child working activities, but these results are mainly driven by the effect of the transfer at the extensive margin. To rationalize these findings, I develop a theoretical model of parental decision regarding child activities. With this framework, I argue that a cash transfer attenuates the likelihood of parents choosing leisure and market work for their child and increases the likelihood that they send the child to school. By modeling the cash transfer as a subsidy of the human capital input and as lump sum transfer, this study also contributes to the discussion of whether cash transfers should be conditional (on school enrollment) or unconditional.
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    Essays on poverty, education and food price increases in developing countries.
    (2011-08) Takamatsu, Shinya
    My dissertation is composed of two essays that investigate whether conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs affect the educational outcomes of non-targeted children in targeted households and the impacts of the global food crisis on household welfare and poverty. In the first essay, to investigate this issue, panel data are used from a randomized experiment conducted in Nicaragua to evaluate the Red de Proteccion Social program. Spillover effects on school enrollment are estimated separately for three types of non-target siblings: older, less-educated siblings; younger siblings; and older, more-educated siblings. Large, positive spillover effects are found for enrollment rates (27.1 and 29.3 percentage points in the first and second years, respectively) only for older, less-educated non-target children. Surprisingly, the estimated effects on enrollment rates are as large as the estimated increases in enrollment rates for target siblings (24.5 and 20.6 percentage points), although they are not directly comparable because of differences in initial enrollment rates. These empirical results are consistent with the predictions from a simple model of the demand for education. It also suggests that an accompanying supply-side intervention could raise schooling outcomes for non-target siblings although the data did not support this hypothesis. The main policy implication of this study is that neglecting spillover effects for non-target siblings underestimates the actual benefits of CCT programs. The second essay evaluates the impacts of the 2007-2008 food price crisis, especially price increases of rice, on household welfare and poverty in Lao PDR (Laos). Households benefit from an increase in the price of rice if they are net sellers of rice, and they suffer reduced welfare from a price increase if they are net buyers of rice. Laos is atypical in that glutinous rice is the main staple, while ordinary (non-glutinous) rice, which is predominately consumed, and traded internationally, in the rest of Southeast Asia, is much less important in the Lao diet. The impact on household welfare in Laos of increases in the price of ordinary rice, the price of which was strongly affected by the food price crisis in 2007-2008, was negligible. This is mainly because the role of ordinary rice in sales and purchases in Laos is not as significant as in other Southeast Asian countries. In addition, during the crisis, price increases for ordinary rice in Laos were lower than those for other countries in Southeast Asia. The estimated effects of the growth rates of glutinous rice prices were not significant, mostly because the price increase in glutinous rice in 2008 was not as large as that of ordinary rice and of those of glutinous rice in the previous years. With (hypothetical) higher price increases of glutinous rice, the change in household welfare for the average Lao household is neutral, yet this average hides the fact that welfare changes are positive in rural areas and negative in urban areas. The sizes of the negative welfare changes among urban households do not vary much by expenditure quintiles or regions, but the size of the positive welfare increases in rural areas are concentrated in Vientiane and the Central region, which have relatively wealthy households. The increases in the national poverty rates due to a sharp hypothetical increase in the price of glutinous rice (40 percent) are less than about 0.5 percentage points. The changes in poverty rates are larger in the Vientiane region, where the poverty rates increase by 1.3 percentage points in urban areas and decrease by 1.8 percentage points in rural areas.
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    Ethnicity, poverty, and secular schooling: Muslim Hui students' identity negotiations in rural China
    (2014-08) Wu, Xinyi
    Intrigued by the heterogeneous development of rural and urban China, persistent poverty in rural ethnic minority regions, and dilemmatic quality compulsory education provided for ethnic regions as a key to poverty alleviation, this dissertation sets out to examine the rural appropriation and implementation of compulsory education and its impacts on the lives of students from one particular ethnic group, Muslim Hui in Xihaigu, Southern part of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in Northwestern China, as they respond to changing rural dynamics, fighting against poverty, and trying to maintain ethnoreligious identity.Informed by critical theory and constructivism paradigms as well as studies of ethnicity and ethnic identity, cultural reproduction theory, and cultural production theory, this study use critical ethnography as a method of research to particularly examine how secular schooling is practiced in this rural and Muslim Hui concentrated region and is lived everyday through routinized pedagogical practices and administrative maneuvers. Most importantly, through the voices of local Muslim Hui, it explores parents' changing views of secular schooling and how the changed views affect Muslim Hui students' exercise their power to participate in school activities, whether they resist against and struggle with secular schooling or straddle across secularity and ethnoreligiosity. In the end, this study attempts to make a theoretical contribution by challenging the binary relationship between the dominating and the dominated that guided majority of studies of ethnic groups in China. Muslim Hui students in my study exhibit diverse reactions and responses to the dominant Han culture and constantly negotiate a life of their own.
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    The Geography of Poverty in America
    (2018-08) Allard, Scott
    "Poverty problems are problems for everybody," says Scott W. Allard, Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Social Policy at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington. Allard's book Places in Need: The Changing Geography of Poverty explores the rise in poverty in America's suburbs over the past three decades. In this video, Allard discusses how the shifting geography of poverty — in combination with the persistent poverty problems in urban centers — poses new challenges for public and nonprofit assistance programs. "Ultimately our ability to tackle poverty effectively is going to hinge on whether we see it [poverty] as a shared fate," he says.
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    Individual, family, and community factors that predict economic self-sufficiency: An analysis of Minnesotans who receive community action agency services.
    (2011-09) MartinRogers, Nicole
    The research question addressed by this dissertation is: What household (individual and family) characteristics and community-level factors contribute to continued material hardship and welfare dependence and inhibit economic self-sufficiency among low-income families? The individuals who participated in this study are clients of one of the 28 community action agencies in Minnesota. Community action agencies are nonprofit organizations that receive funding from the federal Community Services Block Grant to address poverty at the community level. Here the term economic self-sufficiency is used to define a state of being for individuals and families that meet two criteria. The first component is income source. To be self-sufficient, a household must be receiving more than half of their income from sources other than public assistance. The second component is income adequacy. To be economically self-sufficient a household also must not be experiencing material hardship, meaning that they are able to afford both food and housing expenses. To examine the relationship between economic self-sufficiency and various individual/family and county-level variables, multilevel regression modeling techniques were used. The key findings are that: demographic characteristics are generally related to self-sufficiency and the impact of these variables on self-sufficiency is reduced when cash and non-cash supports are controlled in the models; participants' access to and use of cash-and non-cash supports are strong predictors of self-sufficiency, even after controlling for the impact of county-level factors; and nonprofit density is the only county-level factor that is significantly related to individual participants' self-sufficiency, and the nature of this relationship is still unclear. The results of this dissertation suggest that public programs geared toward promoting self-sufficiency should focus on increasing access to non-cash resources and supports, especially in the areas of transportation and housing. Also, community action agencies should make it a goal to register their clients who are eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit. These agencies should also address major barriers to self-sufficiency by assessing and responding to needs for transportation, housing, and child care. More research is needed on the cost effectiveness of various policy and program solutions to improve self-sufficiency.
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    Innovative Methods for Using Census Data to Study Poverty, Labor Markets, and Policy
    (2017-09) Pacas Viscarra, Jose
    This dissertation studies poverty, labor markets, and policy. Integral to this effort are innovative methods for using Census data to study these topics. The dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter studies year-to-year poverty transitions in the United States. The second chapter measures the extent to which individuals’ union membership status affects the levels of taxes they pay and the cost of public benefits they receive. The third chapter analyzes how the electronic employment verification system, known as E-Verify, affects the labor market outcomes of unauthorized immigrants.