Search Results
Journal Article
BankWork$ Gives Underemployed Residents Access to Entry-Level Banking Positions
Low-income residents facing employment barriers are obtaining entry-level job opportunities in the banking industry through a program launched 10 years ago in Los Angeles. The program, BankWork$, is undergoing a planned national replication.
Journal Article
Training for Jobs in the Emerging Energy-Efficiency Industry
The nonprofit Energy Coordinating Agency (ECA) of Philadelphia, Inc. has trained about 2,000 low- and moderate-income adults and teenagers during the past 18 months for jobs in the energy-efficiency field and is simultaneously taking steps to help develop this emerging industry.
Newsletter
How Health Insurance Improves Financial Health
Low-income Americans who became eligible to enroll in Medicaid due to the Affordable Care Act saw their medical debt cut in half.
Journal Article
Universal CSAs in Illinois: Addressing the Racial Wealth Gap
In Angela Glover Blackwell?s essay in What It?s Worth, she talks about her childhood and how she was fortunate to have access to community assets that provide ?ladders for success.? While these assets created a pathway to financial security that included college for many in her community, she acknowledges that similar ?communities of opportunity? are not the reality for many families of color. In Illinois, there are significant disparities in opportunity between majority white communities and communities of color. According to the 2016 Illinois Poverty Report, poverty rates are two to three ...
Report
Racial and Socioeconomic Test-Score Gaps in New England Metropolitan Areas: State School Aid and Poverty Segregation
Test-score data show that both low-income and racial-minority children score lower, on average, on states’ elementary-school accountability tests compared with higher-income children or white children. While different levels of scholastic achievement depend on a host of influences, such test-score gaps point toward unequal educational opportunity as a potentially important contributor. This report explores the relationship between racial and socioeconomic test-score gaps in New England metropolitan areas and two factors associated with unequal opportunity in education: state equalizing ...
Journal Article
The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Commercial Corridors
In her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that the "basic requisite" for maintaining safe cities was "a substantial quantity of stores and other public spaces sprinkled along the sidewalks of a district.... Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety." In this article, the case of Philadelphia is used to explore the extent to which such neighborhood commercial corridors live up to their promise of maintaining public order and city civility, what factors ...
Working Paper
Inflation at the Household Level
We use scanner data to estimate inflation rates at the household level. Households' inflation rates have an annual interquartile range of 6.2 to 9.0 percentage points. Most of the heterogeneity comes not from variation in broadly defined consumption bundles but from variation in prices paid for the same types of goods. Lower-income households experience higher inflation, but most cross-sectional variation is uncorrelated with observables. Households' deviations from aggregate inflation exhibit only slightly negative serial correlation. Almost all variability in a household's inflation rate ...
Journal Article
The When, What and Where of Consumer Debt: The View from Cook County
Consumer debt grew rapidly in the years leading up to the Great Recession, and contracted sharply in its immediate aftermath. This credit cycle played out unevenly among households with different financial means and in different parts of the country. While much attention has been paid to mortgages, other debt categories, such as automobile and student, play an important role in household finances. Consequently, we analyze trends in both mortgage and non-mortgage debt across income groups during the period surrounding the Great Recession.
Journal Article
Nonprofit Focuses on Employment Training and Business and Community Development
Impact Services Corporation, located in Philadelphia?s Kensington neighborhood, is one of the largest nonprofit providers of employment and training services in Pennsylvania. However, Impact is unusual among nonprofits in this field because it works closely with area businesses and creates jobs through community development projects and Impact-owned businesses
Journal Article
The Roadmap to Financial Resilience is About the Journey
Twelve months is more than a year particularly in Chicago. Twelve months is winter ? often with a relentlessly capital W, spring, summer, and fall. It's lazy summer days to school days to skyrocketing heating bills. It?s the seasonality of work intertwined with the seasonality of life, not just in terms of changes in temperature, but in terms of expenses that ebb and flow over the course of time. For all these reasons, discussions about capacity ? whether employment or financial ? must be in the context of an entire year, because we believe that timeline to be the best proxy for the practice ...