Wendy Edelberg

In a new framing paper, Mitchell Barnes, Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, Sara Estep, Robert Greenstein, and Moriah Macklin examine the U.S. social insurance system. They consider the social insurance system as a whole as well as its component parts, providing an overview of major federal programs in the areas of education and workforce development, health, income support, nutrition, and housing opportunity.

In a new blog, Mitchell Barnes, Mark Booth, Wendy Edelberg, and Sara Estep analyze data from the Daily Treasury Statements and examine the impact of the recession on households and business owners across the income distribution.

Lauren Bauer, Arindrajit Dube, Wendy Edelberg, and Aaron Sojourner explore the factors leading to slower-than-expected employment gains during the post-COVID economic recovery as well as circumstances holding people back from participating in the labor force.  

Wendy Edelberg, Sara Estep, Stephanie Lu, and Emily Moss examine and offer new insights on the recent history of housing policy from the latter half of the 20th century to today, compare homeowner and renter experiences, and analyze housing assistance policies. The authors conclude that to increase housing stability, policymakers should improve housing policies to create better infrastructure and more-inclusive housing programs in addition to supplying additional funding.

In this analysis, we examine the impacts of the pandemic recession across different dimensions, including employment, labor force participation, and the need to switch industries. This analysis provides texture and evidence to the emerging understanding that women and people of color, working in the service industry, have been the most negatively affected.

Ten Senate Republicans recently proposed a $618-billion COVID relief package. In this piece, we provide an analysis of that package and update our analysis of the Biden Administration’s $1.9 trillion fiscal package, using the current-law GDP projections that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released on Monday.  

In this piece, Wendy Edelberg and Louise Sheiner project the effect of the Biden package on GDP. They project that if the Biden package were enacted, GDP would reach the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) pre-pandemic GDP projection after the third quarter of 2021, exceeding it by 1 percent in the fourth quarter. In the middle of 2022, GDP would show a temporary and shallow decline and then grow at an annual rate of about 1.5 percent, coming close to the path projected just before the pandemic.

In this analysis, Wendy Edelberg and Stephanie Lu examine the benefits of social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance, rental assistance, and subsidized health insurance. They recommend improving automatic stabilizers so that ad hoc policymaking in the face of an economic downturn becomes the exception, rather than the rule. 

Using updated data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for 2019, the authors of this blog find that the Black-white wealth gap present heading into the COVID-19 pandemic leaves Black households with far fewer resources to weather the storm.

Although Congress' extraordinary measures early in the pandemic created income streams for millions of unemployed workers, they will not continue into 2021 without further congressional action. With the help of an interactive, Lauren Bauer, Wendy Edelberg, and Stephanie Lu discuss the negative consequences of allowing unemployment benefits to lapse at the end of 2020.

In this analysis, Aaronson and Edelberg find evidence of structural damage in the monthly employment data. Early in the pandemic, most workers who lost jobs were laid off temporarily, as businesses expected to reopen and recall their workers.