Urban Institute

About: Urban Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Medicaid & Population. The organization has 927 authors who have published 2330 publications receiving 86426 citations.

The Facts of Lending Discrimination Cannot Be Argued Away by Examining Default Rates

Abstract: This article argues that interracial differentials in mortgage default rates are an unreliable indicator of racial discrimination in mortgage markets. First, minority applicants may be approved at nondiscriminatory institutions and thereby end up in the pool of mortgagors, even though they were first discriminated against at other institutions. Second, even with no mortgage discrimination, the expected default risk of minority mortgagors overall is probably higher than that of white mortgagors overall. Thus, even if discrimination eliminated some of the riskier minority applicants, it is not necessarily true that the default rate of minority mortgagors will be lower than that of whites.

Sentencing Guidelines and the Transformation of Juvenile Justice in the 21st Century

Abstract: As we enter the 21st century, many states have introduced fundamental changes to their juvenile justice systems. The changes focus on jurisdictional authority, especially transfer to adult court; sentencing guidelines and options; correctional programming; interagency information sharing; offender confidentiality; and victim involvement. At the same time, attention has turned increasingly to prevention, early intervention, rehabilitation, and the use of specialized courts. Because of their special significance in the historical context of the juvenile court, this article focuses on the emergence of sentencing guidelines to identify underlying trends and issues in the transformation of juvenile justice. In so doing, the article argues that the considerable attention given by policy makers and researchers to transfer rather than other changes provides a distorted picture of current juvenile justice practice.

The Relationship between Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Locations, Changing Welfare Policies, and the Employment of Single Mothers

Abstract: With single mothers as the primary beneficiaries of welfare and roughly 20% of working-age welfare recipients living in rural areas, an important research question is whether the employment responsiveness of single mothers differs in rural and urban areas. Using nationally representative CPS data, we analyze the relationship between rural-urban locations, changing welfare policies, and the employment of single mothers. Contrary to earlier evidence, we find that welfare reform is playing a major role in raising the employment rates of single mothers, and the gains are approximately as high in rural as in urban areas.

Capital Income Taxation and Progressivity in a Global Economy

Abstract: The increase in international capital mobility over the past two decades has put pressure on the tax treatment of corporate equity income. Corporate-level taxes distort investment flows across locations and create opportunities for tax avoidance by shifting income across jurisdictions. Outward flows of capital shift part of the burden of the corporate-level tax on equity income from capital to labor, thereby making its incidence less progressive. Individual-level taxes on corporate equity income lower the after-tax return to savings but have less distorting effects on investment location and are more likely to fall on owners of capital than workers. This logic suggests there may be both efficiency gains and increases in progressivity from shifting taxes on corporate equity income from the corporate to the shareholder level. We estimate the distributional effects of a tax reform that raises shareholder-level taxes on corporate equity income and uses the revenue to cut the corporate tax rate. We find that taxing capital gains and dividends as ordinary income (subject to a maximum 28% rate on long-term capital gains) would finance a cut in the corporate tax rate from 35% to about 26%, assuming no behavioral response. While the distributional effect depends on what one assumes about the incidence of the corporate income tax, our results suggest that even if the corporate income tax were paid entirely by capital income, the reform would make the tax system more progressive.