Collaborative Research: Family Structure and Inequality in Contemporary America

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In the last three decades, economic inequality among families in the United States has increased. One of the likely drivers of rising inequality is the changing familial landscape, especially the steep decline in the percentage of children living in married-parent families. Notably, other factors related to the structural and economic context of modern American life were also changing and may have also contributed to economic inequality among families. This project analyzes economic inequality among families with children in the contemporary United States. This project will be the first to simultaneously investigate several features of the contemporary American landscape. The goal is to understand 1) how family income and wealth vary by key characteristics of families, such as whether families include one or two parents and, if two parents, whether the parents are married, and 2) how these associations between family characteristics and family economic resources have changed over the time period of 1980-2013. The data, for the years 1980-2013, come from the Current Population Survey and the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Families with at least one resident child under the age of 18 will be classified into one of seven family types. The study willdecompose changes in family economic resources into between- and within-family type components and estimate income volatility, within family type, using both the standard deviation and permanent and transitory variances of family income. The PIs consider both static measures of, and over-time changes in family structure. This project examines factors that may affect family economic resources that have not been fully explored in previous research, including year-to-year changes in parental wages and earned income, changes in resources that families receive from government programs and tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and stability in the number of adults living in the family household. Additionally, we will examine differences across families in wealth and debts, in addition to differences in income. Our results will help social scientists understand how changes in American families are related to growing income and wealth inequality, and whether changes in government programs and taxes are widening economic inequalities among children.