Alongside Harris Professor, Menard Family Pre-Doctoral Fellows Work to Change Understanding of U.S. Poverty

An enormous data collection project under way at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy will bring together billions of records to essentially change the way poverty in the United States is understood.

Driving the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID) project are the Menard Family Pre-Doctoral Fellows, a cohort of researchers charged with linking Census Bureau surveys with individual-level tax data and information from transfer programs such as Social Security payments, Medicare, Medicaid, and housing, food, and veterans’ benefits. 

Each fellow has a vital piece of a giant puzzle that will present for the first time a complete view of households’ economic and social well-being and the effectiveness of government relief programs.

Bruce D. Meyer, the McCormick Foundation Professor at Harris Public Policy, began work on the CID project four years ago to address what he saw as a fundamental problem with how we measure poverty in the United States. His work on the project and the pre-doctoral fellowship program are both supported by a generous gift from the Menard Family made in March 2020.

As Meyer explains, “most of what we know in social sciences comes from surveys of households. And people no longer want to fill out surveys. When they do respond, they tend to give very incomplete answers.’’

Half of pension recipients, for example, answered no when asked a simple question: Do you receive a pension?

“And it’s not just pensions – it’s unemployment insurance, it’s food stamps or SNAP, it’s welfare payments. It’s even Social Security or dividends and interest payments. People just don’t like to talk about their income,’’ said Meyer, considered by many to be the nation’s leading economist studying poverty and inequality.

Policymakers and service providers are left with “a lack of understanding of poverty and how well our programs are reaching people,’’ he said.

Meant to inform policies rather than recommend them, the CID eventually will be available for use in research centers nationwide.

The Menard Family Pre-Doctoral Fellowship program has allowed Meyer to accelerate the CID’s progress.

Gillian Meyer, a Pomona College graduate working as a CID pre-doc, holds the housing piece of the CID poverty puzzle.

Meyer (no relation to Professor Meyer) has spent the last several months gathering, cleaning, and organizing a messy housing benefits dataset from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The work is gratifying even if not glamourous from an outsider’s perspective, she said.

“It’s like solving a puzzle with every dataset. You’ll have a lot of interwoven problems and it’s your job to unzip the whole thing,’’ Meyer said.

The gratifying part: “Now the whole team can use it and connect to all of the projects they’re doing.’’

For the CID project, she spends about 60 percent of her time coding, 20 percent on research, and 20 percent on writing.

“I write a memo for essentially everything I do, and that memo will eventually become part of a paper or part of appendices to a paper,’’ Meyer said.

Meanwhile, Matt Stadnicki is the go-to tax person, linking Internal Revenue Service records to the CID.

His work so far has contributed to a paper on how to improve the accuracy of common tax imputations. He recently began work on a project to estimate the impact of a Biden administration proposal to expand the Child Tax Credit.

A Northwestern University graduate, Stadnicki was first drawn to economics in a high school AP class.

“The teacher presented economics as a way to really understand people and the world and its institutions.  And that really struck a chord with me – in that you could use economics to inform policy,’’ said Stadnicki, who sees the CID project as a valuable step along an economics career path.

Geography’s implications for poverty have occupied Dartmouth University graduate Brian Curran for the past year and a half. When we adjust poverty thresholds for the higher cost of housing in say New York City than Mississippi, do we actually do a better job of identifying Americans who are the most deprived?

“I’ve been able to take ownership of this question and now I’m co-authoring a paper with Bruce and Derek,’’ Curran said, referring to Derek Wu, one of two graduate students who advise the pre-docs and guide their research and analysis.

Curran plans a career in academia and will enter the Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago in the fall. “This job has really prepared me to understand what it’s like to do research, basically every day of the week, as a long-term job.’’

Notre Dame University graduate Connor Murphy is using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Consumer Expenditure Survey to assess whether poverty is better measured by consumption rather than income.

The current income model does not take into account accumulated wealth, for example. If a successful banker loses his job and goes a year without income, his family would be counted as below the poverty line even though they have the resources to sustain a relatively high level of economic well-being.

As a Notre Dame student, Murphy was a researcher at the Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) where he helped with randomized control trials to study what actions successfully lift people out of poverty. The lab’s co-founder Jim Sullivan had co-authored earlier work with Meyer and continues to work with him developing poverty measures based on consumption. (More information about this work can be found at povertymeasurement.org.)

“The CID project gives me the opportunity to take what I learned at LEO and apply it at a national scale,’’ said Murphy, who hopes to stay in Chicago for a PhD program.

Graduate students Angela Wyse and Wu along with CID Executive Director Kevin Corinth oversee and advise the pre-docs’ daily work.

Wyse, who has degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard, is in the third year of a PhD program at Harris. She grew up in Tecumseh, Mich., where her family’s circumstance left them below the poverty line.

Working primarily on homelessness, she sees the CID project as groundbreaking.

“We have national estimates of income and rates of formal employment and rates of program receipt for people who are experiencing homelessness based on the 2010 census. That’s something that no one has been able to come close to doing with other data sources.’’

Wu has been at Professor Meyer’s side since CID began in 2017. In those days, Wu was the one cleaning and coding – the work now done by this third round of pre-docs as the team has expanded. In his fifth year as a Harris PhD student, his thesis relies in part on CID, and he’s working on co-authoring papers with Meyer, the pre-docs, Wyse, and Corinth.

“It all ties back to the CID for me,’’ said Wu, a son of two economics professors, who grew up in Salisbury, Md.

The pre-docs mention and graduate students consistently mention a work culture established by Meyer. It’s one of rigor and support.

“There will be a lot of questions throughout the day and Bruce welcomes them,’’ Gillian Meyer said. “I am comfortable asking anyone on the team if I need assistance.”

The reigning principles are to take care in developing the research question, to take care when touching the data, and to be honest in all steps of the research process.

“We’re pretty efficient when it comes to doing research and papers, but we do not sacrifice rigor or care, because Bruce instills that in all of us,’’ Wu said.

Corinth, who joined the CID project in January, knew Meyer from his time working on a PhD in economics. After graduating in 2014, he spent a few years at the American Enterprise Institute and then joined the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In that role, he was part of a technical working group, co-chaired by Meyer, to develop a new poverty measure.

They were together for 47 meetings over two years. “So I got a head start on learning a lot of the tools and data we’re using here, and really getting to know Bruce much better.’’

The Menard Fellows, he said, all bring passion for understanding poverty in the United States. “And they understand the importance of really rigorous evidence and data.’’

The CID is a long-term project. Meyer expects to make significant strides in the next year and for the work to continue for another 10.

His objective is for the CID to create the data infrastructure to allow “a much better understanding of poverty and the nature of it, who is especially in need of assistance, and how well our programs are doing.’’

Through initiatives like the Menard Family Pre-Doctoral Fellowship program, Meyer said, the CID project’s contribution also will be “a new young group of scholars interested in these questions and possessing the skills to answer them.’’