Scholar spotlight: Joseph Mullins

The research community at the Institute includes visiting scholars, consultants, economists, research analysts, and research assistants. These scholars bring a diversity of backgrounds, interests, and expertise to research that deepens our understanding of economic opportunity and inclusion as well as policies that work to improve both.

In the U.S., welfare programs meant to alleviate poverty often have a goal of getting those they help back to work quickly and off the welfare rolls. That’s supposed to save taxpayers money and make more workers available for the economy.

But taxpayers and workers aren’t the only players involved. There are often young children with an enormous stake in the outcome. Many welfare recipients are single mothers, whose poverty limits their access to high-quality child care.

Economist Joseph Mullins, a visiting scholar at the Institute, wondered what would happen to the government’s cost-benefit analysis if it were to include those children and the workers they would grow up to be.

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As a graduate student, Mullins said he considered focusing on labor market mismatches. That changed after he attended a speech by Nobel laureate James Heckman, an economist famous for research on early childhood education. If we want to reduce income inequality, Mullins heard, evidence shows that the best interventions are those aimed at young children. It’s simply easier to change the course of a person’s life when they’re starting out.

“By the end of that, I just thought nothing I was doing matters compared to this,” he said. “What I’m really drawn to is the sense of possibility we get from results in that field.”

Mullins’ research on how welfare policies affect children’s labor outcomes was born of that conviction.

In a recent paper, he developed a model in which mothers who received smaller welfare payments worked more and spent less time with their children. The reverse was true for mothers receiving larger payments. He paired the model with a decades-long series of household surveys that included details such as how much time children spent with their mothers and the children’s aptitude test results.

Mullins found that children who spent more time with their mothers had better-developed cognitive and behavioral skills that yielded higher earnings in later life.

One conclusion was that, for mothers in very low-wage jobs with no access to high-quality child care, the most productive use of their time was to care for their children. The welfare payments they needed to do that were less than the value of the additional wages those children could earn as adults.

Mullins said he plans to prepare the paper for publication in his time at the Institute. He also plans for future work in the same vein. “In terms of policies that can mediate inequality, this is where a lot of the action is going to be,” Mullins said.

This article is featured in the fall 2024 issue of For All, the magazine of the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute

More scholar spotlights from this issue

Laura Gee —Giving math purpose and voice

Na’ama Shenhav —Empowered women, better outcomes for kids

Brenden Timpe—Making headway on Head Start