Dr. Daniel Schroeder is a Research Scientist at the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources (RMC). He is primarily responsible for evaluating the impacts of government programs in the human services area, including child support, unemployment insurance, workforce development, child care subsidy policy and market, and supplemental nutritional assistance, among others. He is currently Principal Investigator (PI) for a study evaluating the Integrated Child Support System, a program that automatically enrolls divorce and child custody cases in the child support enforcement system. He has recently completed another child support program evaluation looking at the impacts of Individual Development Accounts for non-custodial parents, as well as several studies on the impacts of Workforce Development for non-Custodial Parents.
Daniel serves as PI for the RMC portion of several studies involving collaborations with researchers from other states, including the long-running ADARE group which typically involves projects with five to seven state partners each conducting analysis for their own state to a common specification. The latest incarnation of this partnership is a 7-state study of Unemployment Insurance and SNAP as components of the safety net. He is also PI on the RMC portion, involving mostly the statistical and analytical work, of the Texas Child Care Market Rate Survey, a study with Drs. Monica Faulkner and Jim Schwab of the UT School of Social Work that is now in its tenth year. He has also recently worked with these same partners on similar topics including Texas Child Care Workforce Survey and a Higher Education Capacity Survey.
In addition to leading studies, Dr. Schroeder’s responsibilities include study design, analysis planning, and statistical interpretation for other Ray Marshall Center projects and collaborations, including a Child Care Needs Assessment, the Workforce Data Quality Initiative, and Local Investments in Workforce Development. Much of his recent work has focused on using statistical matching techniques to select quasi-experimental comparison groups in studies for which an experimental design may not be feasible. He has applied these techniques in numerous studies, including most recently estimating the impact of Non-Custodial Parent (NCP) Choices program, a highly successful program mandating workforce development services for low-income NCPs who are unable to keep up with their child support payments. He also has ongoing studies using probabilistic matching of administrative records to study Misreporting Takeup of SNAP in Surveys, after having used similar techniques in the administrative data portion of the 3-City Study of Low Income Populations.
Dr. Schroeder also has extensive experience evaluating programs for the poor, including the Achieving Change for Texans Waiver, examining the impacts of Texas’ package of welfare-reform initiatives; Unemployment Insurance as a Safety Net for former TANF Recipients, a collaboration with Dr. Chris O’Leary of the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research; a study of outcomes for TANF leavers and divertees; and several studies of the child support system, looking at the interplay between earnings of absent parents and the welfare dynamics of their former families.
Dr. Schroeder received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, with a major in Social Psychology and a minor concentration in Statistics.
(Updated January 2015)
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