In this podcast, Giovanni Peri of UC–Davis talks about the need for nuance when considering the effects of immigration on the domestic labor market. While many fear that immigrants will drive down wages or increase native-born unemployment, Peri says there is more to the picture, including geographic concentration and wide variation in skill levels among immigrants. Ultimately, Peri says that to really evaluate the impact of immigration, it's important to understand the margins of adjustment...

Following a 1982 Supreme Court decision, children that arrived in the United States with their undocumented parents were granted full access to the K–12 school system. However, with pathways towards citizenship—and, thus, work, drivers' licenses, voting, and post-secondary education—severely limited, these young people transition toward fewer and fewer rights as they near their 18th birthday. In this podcast, Roberto Gonzales of the Harvard Graduate School of Education talks about his work...

Judith Levine of Temple University talks about her recently released book Ain't No Trust: How Bosses, Boyfriends, and Bureaucrats Fail Low-Income Mothers and Why It Matters. In the podcast, Levine explains how low-income mothers experience more than their share of distrust and how that distrust serves as a form of inequality. In Levine's work, she finds that much of this distrust develops from often-negative social interactions with employers, government workers, and people in the women's...

Pam Herd and Don Moynihan discuss their work on red tape—or administrative burden—and how it affects the way that people access government social welfare programs. They discuss potential benefits of shifting administrative burden from program participants to the program administrators and how improving program implementation can alter the way that people perceive government and civically engage.

Jesse Gregory, assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Louisiana Road Home Program and its effect on helping low-income homeowners rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. He also talks about the challenges of creating policy that balances the need to help disaster victims recover while not encouraging further building in disaster-locations.

Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Public Affairs, talks about the latest Wisconsin Poverty Report, released in June of 2013. Smeeding says that poverty in Wisconsin increased modestly between 2010 and 2011 and that the state saw a statistically significant increase in child poverty, mostly a result of changes in refundable tax credits. The podcast explains the differences between the Wisconsin Poverty Measure...

In this podcast, Daniel Miller of the Boston University School of Social Work discusses his research on measuring child food insecurity in the context of family type, changing family structure, and father involvement. Miller says there's still a lot that we don't know about food insecurity for kids but that understanding the connections between family change and food insecurity has a lot of promise in giving us a better picture of the problem.

In this podcast, Crystal Hall of the University of Washington Evans School of Public Affairs talks about her work applying insights from behavioral and cognitive psychology to better understand the decision making of people living in the context of poverty. Hall explains how the operating assumptions of programs and services might not do a good job at taking account of the many tradeoffs that people with fewer material resources have to make.

Douglas Harris, associate professor of economics and University Endowed Chair in Public Education at Tulane University in New Orleans, talks about the development of the charter school system in New Orleans coming out of Hurricane Katrina. He explains some of the likely hypotheses for why New Orleans' schools might be doing better and discusses the challenges of measuring improvement in the city's schools. Intro Music is from "Stormy Blues" by Arne Bang Huseby

Bryan Sykes, a sociologist at DePaul University, explains some of the barriers that former inmates encounter when trying to find work and how the costs of incarceration disproportionately affect young African American men. He also talks about his work on off-the-books labor and how former inmates still face heavy discrimination in the informal economy. Intro Music is from "Stormy Blues" by Arne Bang Huseby.

A podcast featuring Damon Jones, an economist at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Jones discusses the Earned Income Tax Credit, along with other refundable tax credits, and the associated "lump sum" tax returns for lower income tax filers. He looks into the unpopularity of the now-defunct Advance EITC and how the lessons learned from that program might apply to other efforts to distribute the EITC and other credits throughout the year, as well as the implications...

Marcy Carlson, professor of sociology at UW–Madison, talks about parents having kids with more than one partner and how this can be a challenge for families and for policymakers.

J. Michael Collins, director of the Center for Financial Security, explains some of the efforts behind getting more low-income people to save money and talks about the challenges in developing good policy and helpful financial products for the underbanked population.

Katherine Curtis of University of Wisconsin–Madison's Department of Community and Environmental Sociology talks about developing spatial measurements of poverty and how it is critical to consider locally specific factors when trying to understand the drivers of poverty and child poverty.

Judi Bartfeld, director of the IRP-USDA RIDGE Center, professor with the Department of Consumer Science, and specialist with the University of Wisconsin–Extension, discusses the growth in food insecurity following the Great Recession, measurement methods, and the development of the Wisconsin Food Security Project website.

In July's podcast, Bradley Hardy of American University talks about trends in U.S. income volatility and how shifts towards greater volatility can particularly impact low-income people.

Justin Sydnor, a microeconomist at the Wisconsin School of Business, talks about the growing field of behavioral economics and how it can be applied to research on poverty and the problems facing low-wage workers.

In IRP's first podcast, Dave talks with Christopher Wimer of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality about Wimer's work on measuring unmet food need in San Francisco and Marin County, California.