College prices are rising, pushing potential parental contributions to the extreme and requiring students to take on more student debt. To address this, millions of parents have been putting money away for their children’s education in 529 college savings...
Earlier this year, then-Governor Pat Quinn signed the Illinois Secure Choice Savings Program Act. Starting in 2017, among employers that do not offer a qualified retirement plan, companies with more than 25 workers will need to auto enroll their...
Several interest groups promoted this legislation, and several opposed this ambitious law. Scope of Program The Secure Choice Savings Program will require affected employers to automatically enroll eligible employees who do not opt out and to facilitate payroll deductions...
For example, one of the richest datasets we have is the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) dataset, which has information on nearly every mortgage application in Illinois. This data empowered us to detect and demonstrate disparities in mortgage lending,...
Small businesses in low-income, majority minority neighborhoods in the Chicago area were less likely to receive loans between 2008 and 2012, according to a report from the Woodstock Institute, recipient of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions....
But Illinois just became the first U.S. state to adopt a promising new approach to a big problem in the nation’s retirement saving system: the lack of workplace saving options for low-income workers. Starting in 2017, companies that do...
Woodlawn is the area directly south of the University of Chicago, in the heart of the city’s South Side. The university is surrounded by parks on its east and west, and by Hyde Park, the neighborhood that was home...
President Obama proposed a plan for community college students, called America’s College Promise, which would make two years of community college free for qualified students. President Obama noted that 40 percent of college students choose community college: “Some are...
Starting in 2017, companies that do not offer retirement plans will be required to automatically sign up their workers for a state-sponsored Roth IRA account, funded by a 3 percent (or higher) after-tax deduction from their paychecks, with the...
The Brookings Institution recently published an alarming blog by Richard V. Reeves (Five Bleak Facts on Black Opportunity) showing that over half of children born into lower-income African American families are likely to remain in a lower-income quintile. Even...