Publications

Paycheck Plus raises the top tax credit for low-income workers without dependent children from $500 to $2,000. In a three-year test, the program increased after-credit earnings, reducing severe poverty; modestly improved employment among women and more disadvantaged men; and led to more noncustodial parents paying child support.

This report describes the ways in which eight TANF programs primarily serving American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) families use subsidized employment. It found that their use of subsidized employment has the potential to provide work opportunities for AIAN individuals with limited work experience and barriers to employment.

This report presents 30-month impacts from a random assignment evaluation of a program that subsidized employers to offer temporary paid jobs to young people who were disconnected from school and work in New York City. After 30 months, program enrollees and nonenrollees fared similarly, with the former slightly more likely to report employment.

The fourth in a series from the Chicago Community Networks study, this web feature explores how partnerships within local collaborations can both sustain themselves and adapt in the face of external events, using one Chicago neighborhood as a case study.

An essential step in the child support process is delivering legal documents to the person named as a parent. This infographic summarizes results from a Georgia intervention that aimed to get parents to come in and accept documents voluntarily instead of using a sheriff or process server to deliver them.

A key to interpreting study findings is considering not just the features of a program being tested, but how it differs from business as usual — which may change over the course of the evaluation. The Implementation Research Incubator discusses guidelines for measuring this contrast.

Community college students who enroll in summer courses are more likely to graduate, but most do not attend during the summer. The Encouraging Additional Summer Enrollment (EASE) project uses insights from behavioral science to encourage more students to enroll in summer. This brief presents EASE’s Phase I findings.

To address underplacement, in which students who could succeed in college-level courses are directed into developmental education, community colleges have begun supplementing the typical placement test with measures like high school GPA and noncognitive assessments. This guide walks colleges through the process and pitfalls of undertaking this kind of reform.

This report from the Community College Research Center and MDRC describes how three institutions — University of North Carolina, Charlotte; California State University, Fresno; and Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania — are implementing comprehensive, technology-based advising reforms, including detailed examples of new advising practices, outreach methods, and messages to students.

In the second of two posts on the research opportunities presented by school choice systems, Reflections on Methodology discusses a few issues common to lottery-based analyses — constrained statistical power, imperfect compliance, and restricted generalizability.

To help City University of New York (CUNY) students referred to developmental (remedial) education, CUNY Start delays their enrollment in a degree program for one semester of intensive instruction. This report describes students’ progress through developmental education after one semester, and college enrollment in the semester thereafter.

One in five U.S. children live in poverty. This review examines how children and parents think and feel about poverty and public benefits, as well as how families discuss their economic circumstances. Children report awareness of both material deprivation and stigma.

The Center for Applied Behavioral Science (CABS) combines MDRC’s decades of experience tackling social policy issues with insights from behavioral science. This graphic explains the CABS’s approach to solving problems.

This community college reform directs remedial math students into accelerated course sequences focused on statistics or quantitative reasoning, depending on their programs of study. In a random assignment evaluation, students in the pathways group are enrolling in and passing college-level math at a higher rate than students in traditional courses.

Fathers in Responsible Fatherhood programs can face numerous barriers to remaining involved with their children. This brief describes how MDRC collaborated with fathers to develop DadTime, one of the first smartphone applications designed specifically to help fathers improve their engagement with and attendance at parenting programs.

Drawing from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, this case study is designed as a teaching guide for students and practitioners. Using the example of an effort to increase participation in a tax-credit program, exercises help readers apply behavioral science principles to a real-life problem.

In a randomized controlled trial, measuring treatment contrast – the difference in services received by a program group and those in a counterfactual condition – is critical for understanding what a program’s effects suggest about the best ways to improve services. This paper explains why treatment contrast is important and offers guidance about how to measure it.

STRIVE International engaged MDRC to help the organization improve a new program model aimed at increasing educational attainment and employment of young adults involved in the juvenile justice system. This Issue Focus describes the partnership and offers advice to organizations implementing new programs on how to build evidence of effectiveness.

This benefit-cost analysis examines an Indianapolis program that offered subsidized jobs, case management, peer mentorship, and other support to former prisoners. The program reduced incarcerations and increased employment and earnings among participants, and the overall benefits to society from these effects outweighed program costs.

Many young scholars supported by the Gueron Fund Minority Scholars Program have enriched our organization by participating in fellowships and internships at MDRC over the last 10+ years. And they have gone on to do wonderful things in a variety of places (including coming back to work at MDRC!).