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Child-care assistance is a critical safety net program that directly benefits families and society. But short spells and program churning raise concerns about the effectiveness of the child-care subsidy program to support stable employment and contribute to long-term family economic stability. On the basis of data that link administrative child-care assistance records with survey data on a sample of subsidy recipients in Illinois and New York, we examine demographic, employment, child-care, and subsidy program characteristics associated with the risk of experiencing child-care subsidy instability. As we hypothesized, these factors relate to exit risk, confirming and extending past research on determinants of subsidy instability. The study contributes new policy-relevant knowledge about how employment instability and public benefit rules and practices shape clients' program experiences and in turn how subsidy (in)stability may operate as a mechanism through which stable employment and economic security are ultimately achieved or threatened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We set out to examine the material, psychological, and sociological pathways mediating the income gradient in health and mortality. We used the 2008 General Social Survey-National Death Index dataset (N = 26,870), which contains three decades of social survey data in the US linked to thirty years of mortality follow-up. We grouped a large number of variables into 3 domains: material, psychological, and sociological using factor analysis. We then employed discrete-time hazard models to examine the extent to which these three domains mediated the income-mortality association among men and women. Overall, the gradient was weaker for females than for males. While psychological and material factors explained mortality hazards among females, hazards among males were explained only by social capital. Poor health significantly predicted both income and mortality, particularly among females, suggesting a strong role for reverse causation. We also find that many traditional associations between income and mortality are absent in this dataset, such as perceived social status.