Both existing and novel safety net programs helped keep national food insecurity levels steady from 2019-2020 despite the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. One program crucial to that outcome was Pandemic EBT. Lauren Bauer, Krista Ruffini, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, and Natalie Tomeh present new data showing how a program like Pandemic EBT has the potential to be a powerful tool to fight food hardship among children when schools close for summer.
After adjusting for higher inflation, total family expenses to raise a child born in 2015 have risen to $310,605 according to a new estimate from the Center on Children and Families. In part because the U.S. provides far less assistance to new parents (like child allowances, child care, pre-K, and paid family leave), the greater expense means some families may delay or even forgo having children. But with the recent reversal of Roe v. Wade, many American families' choices will be limited.
The Trump administration scuttled President Obama’s efforts to create a European Union free trade agreement, formally known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). But now, with a multitude of threats facing the United States, from recession to new authoritarian alliances, Sanjay Patnaik and James Kunhardt argue that reviving a TTIP successor could solve several problems simultaneously.
Macroeconomic stabilization for a post-pandemic world. Monetary policymakers traditionally have held the burden of stabilizing the macroeconomy. In a new working paper, Anton Korinek and Joseph Stiglitz argue recent events illustrate that this model is outdated and urgently needs to be replaced, with fiscal policy playing a much more substantial role.
Auditing the prescription drug Consumer Price Index in a changing marketplace. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) includes important information about rising costs of prescription drugs, but there are reasons to suspect that the CPI has not been a good measure of actual trends in drug prices. A new working paper from the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative on Health Policy assesses how the treatment of specialty drugs in the CPI affects growth in measured prescription drug prices.
