View Research by Author - Daniel Kuehn

Publications

The High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGJTI) was a national grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), Employment and Training Administration (ETA). Between 2001 and 2007, more than 160 grants were awarded to establish industry-focused job training and related projects designed to meet the industry’s workforce challenges. This report is the third and final in a series from the national evaluation of the HGJTI conducted by the Urban Institute, the Institute for Policy Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and Capital Research Corporation. This report documents the national initiative, describes the structure and implementation of projects by selected grantees, and provides nonexperimental analysis of the early impacts of job training in selected HGJTI-funded programs. The analysis relies on a review of grant applications and quarterly reports; visits to nine selected grantee sites; data collected from grantee training programs; quarterly earnings data from state unemployment insurance wage records; and administrative data from state and local public workforce system agencies.

The Moving to Opportunity demonstration (MTO) was launched in the early 1990s to evaluate the impacts of using housing vouchers to enable low income families to escape from high-poverty neighborhoods and move into low-poverty communities. This brief uses data from the most recent survey of MTO participants to explore patterns of residential mobility, including the extent to which families gained and sustained access to high-opportunity neighborhoods. Although MTO enabled families to escape from the most severely distressed neighborhoods, few enjoyed sustained access to high-opportunity neighborhoods, despite the provision of targeted vouchers and mobility counseling.

The pace of job growth across the country in this recovery has been slow but not uniform. Metropolitan areas have fared differently, with some experiencing substantially lower job loss than others. This paper examines employment changes across industries that pay low, medium, and high-wages on average by metropolitan area to identify which metros are faring better not only in total employment but in different types of jobs.

Growing up poor strongly predicts poverty and poor adult outcomes. This study explores two primary reasons poverty may persist across generations: risk behavior in adolescence and dropping out of high school. Results suggest that risk behavior and dropping out help perpetuate poor economic outcomes for children from single-parent families but are less important for children who grow up in low-income families. The findings suggest that policies directed at reducing youth risk behavior and dropping out can improve economic outcomes when targeted to youth from single-parent households.

This report documents state restrictions of five small-dollar products: auto title loans, pawnshop loans, payday loans, refund anticipation loans, and rent-to-own agreements between 2005 and 2009, in all states and the District of Columbia. Researchers find that over half of states prohibit auto title loans while a much smaller number of states prohibit payday loans. Nearly all states cap prices on at least one of the five products and the majority of states cap interest rates for pawnshops and payday lenders. Fewer than half of states impose disclosure requirements or price caps on rent-to-own agreements.

Using new nationally representative data from the National Financial Capability State-by-State Survey, this paper examines the relationship between state-level alternative financial service (AFS) policies (prohibitions, price caps, disclosures) and consumer use of five AFS products: payday loans, auto title loans, pawn broker loans, RALs, and RTO transactions. The results suggest that more stringent price caps and prohibitions are associated with lower product use and do not support the hypothesis that prohibitions and price caps on one AFS product lead consumers to use other AFS products.

This series examines youth vulnerability and risk-taking behaviors on several outcomes for young adults, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. Notable results suggest youth follow one of four patterns in connecting to the labor market and school in the transition to adulthood: consistently-connected, later-connected, initially-connected, or never-connected. Second generation Latinos make a fairly smooth transition to young adulthood, but are less likely to engage in post-secondary schooling than whites. Youth from low-income families, distressed neighborhoods, and youth with poor mental health engage in relatively higher levels of adolescent risk behaviors and have relatively lower earnings and levels of connectedness in early adulthood.

The fact sheets examine the transition to adulthood for two groups of youth using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort. Low-income African Americans are compared to low-income white youth, and youth from low-income "high-work" families are compared to low-income youth from moderate-work and nonworking (i.e., low-work) families. Low-income African American youth are vulnerable to lower employment and earnings despite comparable levels of high school education and lower risk-taking behaviors. Low-income youth from high-work families show stronger connections to school or work compared to youth from low-work families, but have comparable employment and earnings during the transition to adulthood.

This brief, part of the Urban Institute's "Recession and Recover" series, examines how the Unemployment Insurance program responds during a recession and how that response may differ in the current recession from its response in the past.

This report is an analysis of alternative datasets and research approaches to assess the effects of Hurricane Katrina on populations served by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Administration for Children and Families (ACF). The assessment addresses four overarching research questions, with an emphasis on using existing datasets: 1) where did populations of interest go and where are they living since Katrina; what are the effects on income and employment; what are the needs for ACF programs and services; and how did the disaster affect ACF programs themselves? The report includes an extensive annotated bibliography of analyses through January 2007.

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