Living in high-poverty, highly segregated neighborhoods can adversely impact the safety, health, mental health, educational performance, and longer-term economic mobility of low-income families. At the same time, compelling new research by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz suggests that when young children move to “high opportunity” areas, their...
Washington
For The Higher Education Randomized Controlled Trial project (THE-RCT), MDRC is creating the largest individual-participant database from higher education randomized controlled trials to date. THE-RCT will make standardized,...
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Job Corps program provides education and training to disadvantaged young people. It offers high school education services combined with career and technical training in a residential setting. The Cascades College and Career Academy (CCCA) pilot is an ambitious and evidence-based attempt...
Brief
Lessons from the BIAS Project
November, 2017
In child support programs, parents must often make complicated decisions with little information in a highly emotional context. The BIAS project, which applied behavioral insights to human services programs, worked with three states to design eight tests focusing on child support order modifications and collection of payments.
Report
Highlights from the Jobs Plus Pilot Program Evaluation
September, 2017
Jobs Plus promotes employment among public housing residents through employment services, rent rule changes that provide incentives to work, and community support for work. Within the first 18 months, all nine public housing agencies in this evaluation had begun structuring their programs, building partnerships, and implementing the model’s core components.
Infographic
December, 2016
As the first major effort to use a behavioral economics lens to examine human services programs that serve poor and vulnerable families in the United States, the BIAS project demonstrated the value of applying behavioral insights to improve the efficacy of human services programs.
Report
Using Behavioral Insights to Increase Incarcerated Parents’ Requests for Child Support Modifications
October, 2016
A behavioral intervention provided incarcerated noncustodial parents in Washington with materials about their eligibility for a child support order modification and how to request one. It increased the number of parents requesting a modification by 32 percentage points and the number of parents receiving a modification by 16 percentage points.
Infographic
August, 2016
Jobs-Plus – a “place-based,” workforce-development model proven to help public housing residents find employment – is about to be replicated across the country. This infographics depicts the program model, its effects on earnings, and the history of its development over the past 20 years.
More than one-third of all children under 18 — about 24 million children — live in single-parent families, the vast majority headed by single mothers. Although there have been improvements (such as automatic deductions from paychecks) in collecting and distributing child support from noncustodial parents (those who do not have physical custody of their children), more...
Issue Focus
Building a Body of Evidence
April, 2016
Over the past several years, MDRC has worked with the federal Administration for Children and Families to test low-cost behavioral interventions to improve child support services in a number of states. This issue focus describes what’s been learned so far — and what’s planned for the future.