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“Robbing Peter To Pay Paul”: Economic And Cultural Explanations For How Lower-Income Families Manage Debt, Laura M. Tach, Sara Sternberg Greene
“Robbing Peter To Pay Paul”: Economic And Cultural Explanations For How Lower-Income Families Manage Debt, Laura M. Tach, Sara Sternberg Greene
Faculty Scholarship
This article builds upon classic economic perspectives of financial behavior by applying the narrative identity perspective of cultural sociology to explain how lower-income families respond to indebtedness. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 194 lower-income household heads, we show that debt management strategies are influenced by a desire to promote a financially responsible, self-sufficient social identity. Families are reluctant to ask for assistance when faced with economic hardship because it undermines this identity. Because the need to pay on debts is less acute than the need to pay for regular monthly expenses like rent or groceries, debts receive a lower …
The Broken Safety Net: A Study Of Earned Income Tax Credit Recipients And A Proposal For Repair, Sara Sternberg Greene
The Broken Safety Net: A Study Of Earned Income Tax Credit Recipients And A Proposal For Repair, Sara Sternberg Greene
Faculty Scholarship
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest federal antipoverty program in the United States and garners almost universal bipartisan support from politicians, legal scholars, and other commentators. However, assessments of the EITC missed an imperative perspective: that of EITC recipients themselves. Past work relies on largely unconfirmed assumptions about the behaviors and needs of low-income families. This Article provides a novel assessment of the EITC based on original data obtained directly from 194 EITC recipients through in-depth qualitative interviews. The findings are troubling: They show that while the EITC has important advantages over welfare, which it has largely …