Description

Individual SEC Membership for 2022-23 Season, $45
Institutional membership (up to 6 persons @$90 total) and students ($10) should arrange directly with an SEC Board Member at sec.secretary@gmail.com
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Professor Jennie Romich teaches social welfare policy and policy practice classes. 
She studies resources and economic well-being in families with an emphasis on low-income workers, household budgets, and families’ interactions with public policy. Her recent projects include research into effective marginal tax rates created by means-tested benefit schedules and the tax system; an investigation of income of families involved with the child welfare system; and mixed-method evaluations of local policy interventions, including the City of the Seattle Paid Safe and Sick Time Ordinance and $15 minimum wage. 
Romich serves as faculty director of the West Coast Poverty Center and is an active member of the Center for Studies of Demography and Ecology.  She co-leads the national effort on “Reducing Extreme Economic Inequality” for the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare’s Grand Challenges Initiative .
Romich holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in economics and earned a doctorate in human development and social policy from Northwestern University.
The TALK today  is about: ​ 
Advancing local economic and demographic research with administrative data"

While city-level minimum wages now cover one in 12 American workers, data limitations impede research on the impact of these local measures. Conventional sources of economic data do not have sufficient small area sample sizes to identify the impacts of local policies, much less create evidence about how local wage mandates might affect subgroups of people who are particularly at risk of exclusion from labor market opportunities. Romich will discuss how the UW Minimum Wage Study developed a uniquely detailed population-level administrative data resource by combining records from different state agencies.  She will illustrate the power of this data through applications to the minimum wage and paid leave laws and outline a proposal for a next-generation population data repository.