Katherine Michelmore, a 2003 graduate of Homewood-Flossmoor High School, has won the 2024 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management David N. Kershaw Award for her research, including how the American Rescue Plan Act increase in the child income tax credit benefited families.
Michelmore, an associate professor in public policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Fold School of Public Policy, is also investigating education policy, labor economics and economic demography.
She said her time at H-F, especially her AP economics course, may have laid the foundation for her interest in the topic.
“I don’t think I appreciated what a great environment H-F was until I left,” she told the Chronicle. “At H-F, I was lucky enough to have AP Econ and that exposed me to micro and macro” theories.
When she got to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, she took the Introduction to Economics course and found she really enjoyed it.
“What I really appreciate was there were so many topics that I didn’t think of as ‘economics,’ more like policy oriented questions that I never associated with economics, so it was really eye opening.” Michelmore double-majored in psychology and economics for her bachelor’s degree.
After graduating, she spent a few years at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. She joined her co-workers on Saturdays offering free tax services to low-income families.
“I just loved it. It wasn’t the taxes themselves, I just loved talking to people about their experiences and what they were doing with their tax credits; how it was making a difference in their lives,” she said. “It just opened my eyes to how the tax system is doing a lot of redistribution of benefits for families. I wanted to know more about how families were benefiting from the tax credits.”
Michelmore left Washington for Cornell University where she earned a Ph.D. in public policy in 2014 and accepted a two-year fellowship at the University of Michigan. From there, she took a position at Syracuse University. She returned to the University of Michigan in 2021.
About that time, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act filled with pandemic relief benefits, including giving families additional tax benefits. That gave Michelmore another stream for her research.
“There was a huge extension of the child tax credit for one year. It was the biggest reform of that tax credit,” she said. The Child Tax Credit went from $2,000 per child to $3,000 per child for children over the age of 6, and $3,600 for children under the age of six. It also raised the eligibility age from 16 to 17.
“We increased the size of it, they also made it fully refundable. For low-income tax filers who didn’t have any tax liability they could claim the full value of the tax credit. Prior to that only part of it was refundable and non-refundable,“ which didn’t benefit low income families, Michelmore explained.
Michelmore has been studying the benefits of the short-lived change.
“It was such a big reform and there were a lot of questions about whether it was going to be made permanent, and there’s been a number of failed proposals to bring it back,” she said. Researchers are trying to gauge what the tax credit did for families.
“I do have some work, especially on how the families used the credit and how it affected them. What we have shown is the credit really helped reduce food insecurity,” she said. While some used the money to pay down debt, many used it for food.
“The biggest headline we found is those monthly credits really reduced household food insecurity, especially for low income families,” she noted, and other research work is showing some improvement in the mental health of low-income family members.
“The biggest consistent finding is it reduced material hardship. It dramtically reduced child poverty for that year as well. It just really illustrates how much child poverty is affected by policy in some ways. I think the child tax credit, in particular, there was evidence of what it did. But if I look at the research community there’s still mixed evidence.”
Michelmore will be officially presented with the David N. Kershaw Award and Prize at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s annual conference this month where she will give a lecture.
The award is given to a person younger than 40 who has made distinguished contributions to the field of public policy analysis and management. The award, which comes with a $20,000 prize, recognizes the original contributions to research-based knowledge that have advanced the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies.
