This edition was written by Tara Watson and Sasha Snyder.
💡 New from us: School funding equity and the fiscal impact of immigration
In a new analysis, Sarah Reber, Beyond Deng, and Gabriela Goodman examine school funding equity across the U.S. over several decades. They show that contrary to common narratives, high-poverty and predominantly non-white districts have spent more per pupil than lower-poverty areas for decades, though higher labor costs offset much of this advantage for non-white districts. Although within-state funding has increasingly targeted high-poverty districts since the mid-1990s, spending gaps between states remain a major driver of inequity because low-income students are disproportionately located in lower-spending states.
In a recent JPAM point-counterpoint essay, Tara Watson comments on an analysis by Cato’s David Bier regarding the fiscal impact of immigration. She agrees with Bier's broad takeaway that immigrants and their descendants contribute more in tax revenue than they receive in public benefits, but notes that estimates are highly sensitive to methodological choices such as lifecycle accounting and the treatment of public goods. Watson emphasizes that the resulting fiscal gains are distributed unevenly across levels of government. While the federal government captures most of the long-run upside, states and localities bear the immediate, short-run costs of localized services like K–12 education.
📖 What we’re reading
Is the iPhone a form of birth control?Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper study how the rollout of the first-generation iPhone—sold exclusively through AT&T from 2007 to 2011—affected fertility patterns in the United States. They use this rollout as a natural experiment to estimate causal effects of early smartphone access on births, finding that iPhone access reduced births by about 4.5–8.0% among teenagers and 3.2–6.6% among women aged 20–24, with smaller declines among older cohorts. The results suggest that smartphone diffusion explains roughly one-third to one-half of the post-2007 22% decline in fertility in the U.S., likely by reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography consumption, and lowering sexual frequency. Christine Emba’s essay in The New York Timescontextualizes these findings in light of broader trends of technology and interconnectedness.
How do elite colleges shape human and social capital transmission across generations?Andrés Barrios-Fernández, Christopher Neilson, and Seth Zimmerman use intergenerationally linked data from Chile to examine how a parent's attendance at an elite college affects their children's social and human capital. They find that a parent's admission to an elite college—compared to that of those who just missed the cutoff—increases the probability that their children will attend an elite private school by 20%, and also raises the probability that they live near and interact with high-status peers. The authors suggest that this upward mobility is driven primarily by exposure to high-status peers, particularly through residential proximity and marriage markets, rather than by any direct gains in human capital.
Do industry credentials improve outcomes for community college students more than training alone?Di Xu, Kelli A. Bird, Michael Cooper, and Benjamin L. Castleman analyze administrative data from FastForward, a noncredit workforce training program in the Virginia Community College System, to compare enrollees who earn credentials and those who complete similar training without them. They find that earning an industry-recognized credential increases quarterly earnings by $818, an almost 10% increase relative to pre-enrollment income. These findings indicate that the credential itself is the primary driver of labor market gains.
📊 Top chart: Total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment has decreased across all states since March 2025
This month’s top chart comes from a KFF monthly tracker that monitors trends in public health coverage using data reported by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Since March 2025, total Medicaid/CHIP enrollment has decreased across all states, with declines ranging from 20% in Indiana to less than 1% in Iowa. There has been a drop in child enrollment across all states and decreases in adult enrollment in all but six states. Enrollment is projected to decrease further over the next decade due to upcoming work requirements and immigrant eligibility restrictions enacted under the 2025 reconciliation law.
➡️ Worth a click
Listen to this Financial Times podcast with Melissa Kearney on how declining fertility rates are reshaping the economy.
Read this Atlantic piece on how states are responding to the “Mississippi Miracle.”
Explore Samuel Moyn’s new book on gerontocracy in America and how an aging population concentrates wealth and power.
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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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