Publications

Lawrence Katz explores questions raised by findings from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project: the potential effect of behavioral nudges on long-term outcomes, determining who responds to behavioral nudges but would not otherwise participate in a program, and moving to higher-intensity efforts when low-cost interventions are not enough.

Examining the scholarly literature published since a seminal review in 2000, this working paper discusses the principles that underlie project-based learning, how it has been used in K-12 settings, the challenges teachers have confronted in implementing it, and what is known about its effectiveness in improving students’ learning outcomes.

Housing Choice Vouchers subsidize rent and utilities for homes that families rent from private landlords. The Rent Reform Demonstration is testing an alternative rent policy for voucher recipients. This report describes the new policy, the rationale behind each of its elements, and the way it is being evaluated.

The City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) is an uncommonly comprehensive and long-term program shown to raise graduation rates among community college students. Following up after six years, MDRC finds that ASAP increases graduation rates and enables some students to earn their degrees sooner.

The SIMPLER framework was developed for the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project ― the first major effort to apply behavioral insights to human services programs in the United States. SIMPLER summarizes several key behavioral concepts that can guide practitioners interested in using behavioral insights to enhance service delivery. 

Implementation research on community initiatives should be able to read networks. This means understanding not just the presence or absence of partnerships, but also core patterns of collaboration, the distribution of network power, and the depth of local relationships.

To improve outcomes among high-interest borrowers, policymakers need  to understand what is driving usage. This second post in MDRC’s Reflections on Methodology series discusses how a data discovery process revealed clusters of borrowers who differed greatly in the kinds of loans and lenders they used and in their loan outcomes.

Home visiting provides information, resources, and support to expectant low-income parents and low-income families with young children. This brief summarizes evidence from existing studies on the impact of early childhood home visiting on children 5 and older for four national models of home visiting.

In September 2017, MDRC released interim findings from the Paycheck Plus demonstration and evaluation of an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage workers without dependent children in New York City. Here are a few answers to questions we’ve received about the results.

Faced with many applicants with very low math skills, community colleges are responding with a variety of reforms, including restricting developmental courses to students with high-school-level skills. This brief provides context for the policy changes and describes the alternatives two colleges offer to those who don’t make the cut.

In this commentary from the final report on the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, Sheldon Danziger talks about the value of incorporating insights from behavioral science into new system-level interventions when developing policies to help low-income populations.

FSS provides case management services and a long-term escrow-savings account to housing-assisted families; an enhanced version also offered short-term cash work incentives. Six-year results of the random assignment evaluation show few significant effects overall for either program. However, the enhanced program increased employment and earnings for participants not working at enrollment.

This grant program funds semester-long paid internships for college juniors and seniors with financial needs. These part-time opportunities, typically with hourly wages of $10-$14, are intended to provide meaningful experiences connected to students’ career interests. Despite some difficulties, many students had highly positive impressions of the program overall.

Paycheck Plus offers workers without dependent children an enhanced Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) worth up to $2,000 per year for three years (four times the current EITC for singles). Results after two years from a random assignment evaluation show that it has increased income and work rates.

WorkAdvance offers training and placement services to help prepare individuals for quality jobs in sectors that have strong local demand and advancement opportunities. In this update on employment and earnings only, the most experienced provider continued to produce substantial impacts on both; one other provider increased earnings for late enrollees.

Machine learning algorithms, when combined with the contextual knowledge of researchers and practitioners, offer service providers nuanced estimates of risk and opportunities to refine their efforts. The first post of a new series, Reflections on Methodology, discusses how MDRC helps organizations make the most of predictive modeling tools.

Encouraging Additional Summer Enrollment (EASE) aims to increase summer enrollment rates among low-income community college students using insights from behavioral science. This infographic describes some of the benefits of summer enrollment, reasons why students may not enroll in summer, and interventions the EASE team designed to address low enrollment rates.

As organizations increase their use of sophisticated screening and risk assessments in their decision making, the results have the potential to fundamentally change practice, organizational culture, and the structure of work. Implementation researchers can inform the use of predictive analytic tools both before and after their adoption.

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.

MDRC’s Chicago Community Networks Study explores ways to consider power in networks of neighborhood organizations, how power is configured differently in different Chicago neighborhoods, and how these patterns can help communities respond to local challenges.