This article explores how AI and Rules as Code are turning law into automated systems, including how governance focused on transparency, explainability, and risk management can ensure these digital legal frameworks stay reliable and fair.
This article examines how the decentralization of safety net programs after welfare reform has led to growing inequality in benefit generosity and access across U.S. states.
This study examines public attitudes toward balancing equity and efficiency in algorithmic resource allocation, using online advertising for SNAP enrollment as a case study.
Through our research understanding the government digital service field and what workers in this field need, we want to help strengthen those existing roles and establish more pathways for promotion and career support, as well as help other teams recognize the value of these skills and create new roles.
This article analyzes the strategic use of public policy as a tool for reshaping public opinion. Though progressive revisionists in the 1990s argued that reforming welfare could produce a public more willing to invest in anti-poverty efforts, welfare reform in the 1990s did little to shift public opinion. This study investigates the general conditions under which mass feedback effects should be viewed as more or less likely.
Medicaid and SNAP have reduced racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare access and food security, but some administrative and eligibility policies continue to create inequitable barriers.
Well-designed, user-focused tools that allow for simple application are key to ensuring that families most in need receive the Child Tax Credit. Reaching these households will require a robust effort from the IRS to create user-friendly tools in partnership with organizations with a direct connection to eligible recipients.
This paper concludes that the substantial COVID-19 unemployment insurance expansion had limited disincentive effects on job searches, particularly among lower-income individuals, despite high wage replacement rates.
This study explores the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years, with a control group of 2,000 participants receiving $50/month.
Accounting for the strong effects of health care access, this study finds that SNAP is associated with reduced hospitalization in dually eligible older adults. Policies to increase SNAP participation and benefit amounts in eligible older adults may reduce hospitalizations and health care costs for older dual eligible adults living in the community.
The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers—predominantly African Americans—from the 1935 Social Security Act's unemployment insurance program is analyzed as a result of international policy diffusion rather than solely domestic racial politics.
