This edition was written by Tara Watson and Emily Snider.
💡 New from us: Parenting in the modern era and more
Abby McCloskey’s new podcast explores the major structural changes that have recently affected childrearing in the U.S. and offers new policy ideas to address them. In the first episode, McCloskey and health economist Emily Oster discuss the biggest health challenges facing U.S. youth today. Oster emphasizes the importance of healthy eating, noting that school lunches are the healthiest meal of the day for many children, though there is still room for improvement. She suggests investing more in creative approaches to school lunches: while school lunch regulations are strong, many children may simply throw out the bag of vegetables they are given.
In a recent report, Kristin Butcher, Anne Fournier, Camilo Garcia-Jimeno, Aneesh Kudrimoti, and Alan Mathew assess how different calculations of working-age population growth affect estimates of the number of jobs needed to maintain a stable unemployment rate. Focusing on 2022–2024, a period marked by a surge in immigration following the pandemic, the authors find that uncertainty about the size and growth of the working-age population overstated the strength of the labor market relative to what was indicated by subsequent revisions.
Research by Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach finds that states’ SNAP payment error rate estimates produce large margins of error, with confidence intervals that are wider than most of the bins themselves. They argue that random chance—instead of efforts to improve program administration—will substantially contribute to determining how much a state will be required to pay in SNAP benefits under the OBBBA’s new policies. They suggest that the federal government should continue to fully fund SNAP benefits because the new policy will generate wild swings in annual budgets due to random chance, which could force some states to leave the program.
Jacob Bastian explains that the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) helps explain why consumer sentiment remains weak even though many economic indicators have improved. In early 2022, a temporary benefit that provided hundreds of dollars to families with children expired. The drop in benefits explains most of the decline in sentiment among households with children and about 15% of the gap between consumers’ sentiment and what economic indicators alone would have predicted in early 2024. Bastian notes that when policymakers evaluate these temporary programs, they should consider what happens to people when the benefits disappear. Affected households end up both poorer and more pessimistic about the economy and government.
📖 What we’re reading
Do restrictions on the use of in-kind transfers like SNAP alter consumer behavior?David Frisvold and Felipe Lozano Rojas find that SNAP food restriction waivers that limit the use of SNAP funds to purchase sugary beverages decrease soda purchases by 13 percent in the average SNAP household. Their findings suggest that behavioral models incorporating mental accounting and labeling better explain consumer responses to SNAP purchase restrictions than predictions based on traditional demand theory.
How and why does child maltreatment reporting vary across institutions?Jason Baron, Micah Baum, Joseph Doyle Jr., Maria Fitzpatrick, Brian Jacob, and Joseph Ryan observe that school-specific child maltreatment reporting practices account for about 40 percent of the variation in reporting rates across schools. They find that differences in diagnostic skill explain more than twice as much variation as differences in preferences, and that higher-reporting schools tend to be more skilled at identifying high-risk cases. The authors suggest that improving detection skills could result in significant welfare gains, whereas policies to equalize reporting rates could increase the number of high-risk cases that go unreported.
What does it mean to be truly integrated into the U.S.? In response to the question of birthright citizenship reaching the Supreme Court, Kristie De Peña wrote a report arguing that those who become Americans are people whom the country deliberately chooses, asks to contribute, and equips to do so. She argues that true integration into the U.S. is not simply determined by whom the country admits or excludes based on documents or court decisions.
📊 Top chart: Refugee admissions to the US have dramatically dropped in Trump’s second term
This month’s top chart from Pew Research Center shows that the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. has fallen significantly during President Trump’s second term. The federal government admitted 10,258 refugees in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026, which is down from 100,034 in fiscal year 2024.
➡️ Worth a click
Read this article from the American Economic Association highlighting recent research showing that a marginal increase in H-2B visas expands production, investment, and profits at American firms without reducing employment among American workers.
Browse this report from the Urban Institute that outlines how foundations and philanthropies can protect K-12 education data.
Check out this commentary from the Niskanen Center, which argues that indexing TANF benefits to the federal poverty level is the most effective way to support families.
About the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at Brookings
The Center for Economic Security and Opportunity (CESO) produces data-driven, nonpartisan analysis to address the United States’ most challenging social policy questions. In a noisy and polarized world, the Center is a trustworthy source for the information and tools policymakers need to build an economy that works for everyone.
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