Margot Jackson
Biography
Jackson is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown. Her research focuses on the study of poverty and inequality among U.S. children and families, and the role of the social safety net in affecting family behavior and welfare. Her research has been published in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Demography, Social Science and Medicine and other venues, and funded by NIH, the Russell Sage Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. She received her BA from Brown and her PhD in sociology from UCLA.
Research
Jackson's research focuses on the study of poverty and inequality among U.S. children and families, and in the role of childhood circumstances in contributing to intra- and intergenerational inequality. Her current research focuses on the potential for public sector investments and public policies to narrow inequality among children and families. With colleagues at the Urban Institute, she has produced a longitudinal, state-level database that measures government spending on children in detail for 25 major programs in the areas of education, health, income support and housing between 1997-2022 (the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset). She is using these data in combination with household surveys and administrative data to advance understanding of how public investments affect parents' investments of money and time in children, and to examine the relative effects of different forms of social safety net investments on child well-being.
Publications
Jackson, Margot I., Christopher Wimer and Chloe Zilkha. 2024. “Social Spending on Children and the Sources of Household Income across U.S. States, 1997-2016.” Demography.
Jackson, Margot I., Haoming Song* and Ariel Kalil. 2024. “State-Level Safety Net Spending and Educational Gaps in Maternal Time with Children.” Journal of Marriage and Family 86(2): 412-432.
Jackson, Margot I. and Ester Fanelli*. 2023. “Who Uses the Social Safety Net? Trends in Public Benefit Use among American Households with Children, 1980-2020.” ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 706(1): 16-36.
Jackson, Margot I., Susanna Loeb and Susan Moffitt. 2023. “Reconstructing the Social Safety Net: Overlapping Public Investments and Child Well-Being.” Editors, special issue of ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. 706(1).
Jackson, Margot I, Emily Rauscher and Ailish Burns*. 2022. “Social Spending and Educational Gaps in Infant Health: 1998-2017.” Demography 59(5): 1873-1909.
Teaching
Unequal from Birth: Child Health from a Social Perspective
Legacies of Inequality: The U.S. and Beyond
Statistics for the Social Sciences
Methods for Analyzing Clustered and Panel Data
Social Stratification, Inequality and Mobility