Berger and Harden have offered a comprehensive and compelling overview of the state of empirical research on racial inequalities in child welfare system outcomes. They show that Black children and families experience CPS intervention across a range of outcomes more frequently than White peers. They suggest four causal pathways that could account for these inequalities: 1) differential surveillance; 2) decision-maker bias within CPS; 3) differential risk of child maltreatment; and 4) structural racism. They suggest that evidence for differential surveillance and within-CPS bias are likely small (or negligible) contributors to Black/White inequalities in child welfare outcomes; instead, current evidence strongly points to differential risk of maltreatment and structural racism as key drivers of differential Black child and family exposure to child welfare systems.
While Berger and Harden's set of four causal pathways do adequately capture those proposed in most research literature, this framework misses a subtle vector for how racism impacts the CPS policy process. As I attempt to illustrate in Figure 5 of my first essay, historical and contemporary racism have impacted the policy field itself. The quantity and quality of interventions available to front-line social workers to respond to children and families in crisis are themselves products of racist social processes. The narrow focus on marginal effects of race on CPS outcomes common in econometric analyses implicitly naturalizes these arrangements. From a critical perspective, the common counterfactual question may be more accurately stated as: “within a policy system known to have racist design features and policy goals, and in a context of deep structural inequality, do otherwise comparable Black and White children experience different outcomes?”
If we bracket our definition of the concept of racial discrimination to merely the marginal impact of the perception of skin color on a discrete outcome of a policy process we can obtain an answer to this question. However, these approaches reduce the complex social stratification system of race to the perception of phenotypical differences (Kohler-Hausmann, 2018), obscuring the structural and institutional causal pathways that produce race as a system of social and family stratification salient for CPS processes (Feely & Bosk, 2021). For example, in recent work, Baron and colleagues (2024) found evidence of differential treatment of Black children by CPS agency workers in Michigan but paradoxically argued that evidence points to an “under-protection” of White children compared to Black children through their assessment of the probability of intervention conditional on their measurement of maltreatment risk. While I disagree with their interpretation of this evidence, this finding does present an interesting and useful counterfactual that deserves further scrutiny.
What kind of child wel
Drawing on a natural experiment generated by prefecture-level centralization reforms in China in the early 2000s, we study whether a centralized regulatory system delivers better environmental outcomes in a developing country context. We examine the impact of centralization reforms on firm air pollution emissions using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. We find that centralization reform reduces firm air pollution intensities in total waste air, SO2, and soot. This effect is robust when we control for contemporaneous environmental policy changes and SOE reforms and when we use alternative differences-in-differences estimations. We perform placebo tests to further demonstrate that the relationship is unlikely a function of a selection effect and omitted variables. Empirical tests on mechanisms reveal that pollution reduction is mainly due to increased pollution removals during the end-of-pipe treatment stage while there is little evidence that centralization increases firm scale of production, productivity, efficiency, and innovation efforts. We show that such firm responses are likely a function of increased regulatory enforcement brought by the reform. Finally, we test whether a centralization reform drives local firms away (i.e., a spillover effect) and we find no supporting evidence.
The administrative capacity of a government matters enormously to public policy design and implementation. But it is usually taken for granted in public policy settings, a background variable left largely unconsidered. This essay argues that the fields of public policy and public management need to more directly consider threats to state capacity. A creeping threat is a tendency towards proceduralism that layers in rules, veto points, and delay that constrains state actors from achieving critical goals. A more immediate threat for the American administrative state is a dramatic increase in the politicization of public service delivery. This new model of politicization pursued by President Trump features three key attributes: 1) a personalist infrastructure of presidential power that centers on loyalty above all other values; 2) governing by fear via conspiratorial messaging towards the public sector and threatening individual public servants; and 3) a weakening of civil service protections that blurs the traditional distinction between political appointees and civil servants and enables purges of those deemed to be disloyal.
Work requirements are perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, America's sole federal cash assistance program for low-income families with children. In 2025, for the first time in nearly 20 years, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA) will implement policy changes intended to strengthen states’ work requirements. However, researchers’ and policymakers’ understanding of how FRA will impact states’ compliance with federal requirements is hampered by a lack of research and publicly available data. We tie information from reports submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that we collected to administrative caseload and expenditure data to document several strategies that states currently use to comply with federal work requirements. We estimate that FRA will increase the stringency of work requirements in 23 states and that five states will begin to fall short of requirements. We note that several compliance strategies available to these states do not encourage work. We discuss changes to states’ work requirements that would promote better long-term economic and labor market outcomes for TANF recipients.
The corporatization of local public services is an increasingly common public management reform worldwide. This study investigates whether a shift from in-house to not-for-profit corporatized service provision can result in improvements across multiple dimensions of performance. To do so, we examine the staggered adoption of Arms-Length Management Organizations (ALMOs) to provide social housing by a third of English local governments during the period 2000 to 2008. Utilizing a Differences-in-Differences (DiD) with Multiple Time Periods (MTP) approach, we find that corporatized social housing outperformed in-house provision on service quality, citizen satisfaction, and environmental sustainability, with little evidence of worse achievements on other performance dimensions. Event history analysis suggests performance benefits emerged around 2 years after corporatization occurred. Our study therefore implies that not-for-profit corporatization is potentially an effective strategy for improving local public service performance.
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