Lauren Bauer

Between 9 and 17 million children live in a household where the adults say that their children do not have enough to eat, and they do not have the resources to purchase more food. Lauren Bauer and Jana Parsons find that prepared meal programs are reaching a fraction of the eligible population, evidence that supports an extension of Pandemic EBT.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the United States with a set of unique public health and economic challenges. Economically, the crisis has negatively affected businesses, the labor market, and households. In this set of 10 facts, Wendy Edelberg, Kristen Broady, Lauren Bauer, and Jimmy O’Donnell assess the extent of these economic damages and provide an overview of existing policy interventions.  

In this blog post, researchers show that there is room for Congress to improve the triggers under current law that turn on and maintain the Unemployment Insurance Extended Benefits program to support the long-term unemployed when the labor market is weak. They also show that there is room for states to take full advantage of provisions under current law by opting into more generous benefit extensions.

In this blog post, Lauren Bauer, Abigail Pitts, Krista Ruffini, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach find that Pandemic EBT reduced food hardship experienced by low-income families with children and lifted at least 2.7-3.9 million children out of hunger.

In this piece, Lauren Bauer presents new evidence that almost 18 percent of children in the US did not have sufficient food as recently as the third week in June during the COVID-19 pandemic, meriting a substantial and immediate public investment.

Since the March Employment Situation, the number of respondents reporting as "employed but absent from work due to other reasons" has risen as a share of the labor force. In this blog, Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, Jimmy O'Donnell, and Jay Shambaugh explore the nature and magnitude of this phenomenon and analyze who these "potentially misclassified" respondents are.

In this blog post, Lauren Bauer documents new evidence from two nationally representative surveys that were initiated to provide up-to-date estimates of the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the incidence of food insecurity.

This interactive allows users to find out how many people and SNAP households lived in places that would have lost the protection of a SNAP work requirement waiver during the Great Recession (in 2009) and during an expansion (in 2018) had the Trump Administration's final rule been in place.

Lauren Bauer and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach detail policy responses tailored to the COVID-19 pandemic to support food security, particularly for households with children.

In this analysis, we examine how prime-age working (ages 25–54) men and women allocate their time, overall and by parental status. This analysis shows that for some, especially mothers, caregiving and other household obligations reduce the amount of time that can be spent looking for work and working.

The Hamilton Project analyzes the characteristics and labor force participation of Americans who were living in poverty in 2018. Researchers found that although the poverty rate has declined, barriers remain to lifting households out of poverty.

The final rule on work requirement waivers, released on December 4, 2019, weakens SNAP's role as an automatic stabilizer and a critical element of the safety net. The Hamilton Project analysis finds that the final rule would respond more slowly to a recession than current rules as well as the proposed rule, would curb a state’s ability to apply for work requirement waivers when its economy is weak or relatively weak compared to the overall national economy, and would severely limit access to SNAP during a sluggish recovery.