Chapter 2022-218, Laws of Florida, required the Florida Clerks of Court Operations Corporation (CCOC) and the clerks of court to establish, by or after July 1, 2023, a statewide database of guardian and guardianship information. The law also directed OPPAGA to analyze data compiled in the statewide database and conduct a comparative analysis of guardianship laws in other states. This is the first in a series of four reports. The CCOC is in the process of developing a database of statewide guardianship information for judges and clerks and a publicly accessible website. For each professional guardian, the database must include registration status, disciplinary history, compliance with qualifications, and status of required reports. The database must be searchable by the name of the petitioner, ward, guardian, and legal counsel; demographic information of the ward; location of the guardian's office; name of the judge and circuit; and the number of wards served by each guardian. OPPAGA found that CCOC encountered several challenges in creating the database, including lack of standardization across data systems and the absence of processes for capturing required data elements. CCOC has found ways to address many of the challenges and anticipates that the database and the accompanying website will be launched in November 2024. OPPAGA examined the guardianship laws in other states in three areas related to safeguards against abuse by guardians to see how other states compare to Florida in providing protections for wards. As many of the states OPPAGA identified do, Florida requires a criminal background check for professional guardians. Florida is 1 of 9 states that OPPAGA identified that require a financial background check and 1 of 17 states that require professional guardians to be registered or certified.

Reentry from incarceration, in general, can be a challenging time for people as they are preparing to transition back into the community. For people with a substance use disorder, reentry is even more challenging because of the potential to relapse and experience overdose. People in reentry are at highest risk of an overdose or even death during the first 48 hours of reentry, and that risk continues 2 weeks following release into the community. This risk is highest among people using opioids. Studies show that family support can improve outcomes for a person in treatment, however, and is a significant factor in predicting long-term recovery. This guide outlines ways to support a family member or loved one and evidence-based strategies for achieving recovery, including tips for families who want to support these efforts. Key strategies include consistent sleep, a healthy diet, daily exercise, work or school routine, and support groups.

In 2024-25, the average published (sticker) tuition and fees for full-time undergraduate students at public four-year in-state was $11,610, $300 higher than in 2023-24 (2.7% before adjusting for inflation). Between 1994-95 and 2024-25, the average published tuition and fees increased from $2,780 to $4,050 for public two-year in-district students, from $5,740 to $11,610 for public four-year in-state students, and from $24,840 to $43,350 for private nonprofit four-year students, after adjusting for inflation. Between 2016-17 and 2021-22, federal appropriations and government grants and contracts per student increased by 38% at public doctoral institutions and more than doubled at other types of public institutions, after adjusting for inflation. Between fall 2019 (pre-COVID-19) and fall 2022, total postsecondary enrollment declined by 1,043,200 (5%)—from 19.5 million to 18.5 million. Total undergraduate enrollment declined by 7% (from 16.4 million to 15.3 million) and total graduate enrollment increased by 3.5% (from 3.066 million to 3.174 million).

In the social sciences, the term peer effects has been used to describe the various ways in which individual behaviors and attitudes can be influenced by friends, acquaintances, and the wider social environment. Due to the crucial role of social interactions within the school context, the role of peers in shaping academic outcomes has been extensively studied. However, estimation of peer effects n is complicated by several major problems some of which cannot be solved even with random assignment. This study designed a field experiment and proposes a new estimation technique to address these estimation problems including the mechanical problems associated with repeated observations within peer groups. The field experiment randomly assigns students to one-to-one partnerships in an important gateway STEM course at a large public university. The research team find no evidence of peer effects from estimates of exogenous peer effect models. The research team push further and estimate outcome-on-outcome models which sometimes reveal peer effects when exogenous models do not provide good proxies for ability. The research team find some limited evidence of small, positive outcome-on-outcome peer effects (which would have been missed without our new estimation technique). Standard estimation methods fail to detect peer effects and even return negative estimates in our Monte Carlo simulations because of the downward bias due to mechanical problems. Simulations reveal additional advantages of our technique especially when peer group sizes are fixed. Estimates of non-linear effects, heterogeneous effects, and different measures of peer ability and outcomes reveal mostly null effects but the research team find some evidence that low-ability peers negatively affect low-ability and medium-ability students. The findings in this setting of long-term, intensive interactions with classroom random assignment and “throwing everything at it” provide evidence of, at most, small positive peer effects contrasting with the common finding of large peer effects in previous studies in education.

This study found that the 2023 national official poverty rate of children under 18 was higher than the child Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The SPM is a measure of economic deprivation—having insufficient financial resources to achieve a specified standard of living. The SPM addresses some of the limitations of the official poverty measure, without supplanting it outright. Both the SPM and the official measure determine the poverty status of people and families by comparing their financial resources against poverty thresholds that are valued in dollars. California, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey were the only four states where the SPM child poverty rate was not statistically lower than the official child poverty rate (which for this analysis includes unrelated individuals under 15). The official rate was higher than the child SPM rate in 46 states and the District of Columbia. The SPM and official poverty measures each provide distinct indicators of the nation’s economic well-being. The SPM broadens the official poverty measure by accounting for government programs designed to assist low-income families that are not included in the official poverty rate. In 2021, the national child SPM rate was its lowest ever at 5.2%, which was mostly attributed to the 1-year expanded Child Tax Credit. The rate increased to 12.4% in 2022 and 13.7% in 2023, after the expansion expired. Utah was among the states with the lowest official poverty rate (7.0%) and New Mexico among the states with the highest (27.4%). Nebraska had one of the lowest SPM poverty rates (3.6%) and District of Columbia had one of the highest (15.5%). There were no states where the child SPM rate was statistically higher than the official child poverty rate.

Sociologists have argued that “third places” like cafés, which provide opportunities for individuals to socialize and exchange ideas outside of home and work, improve neighborhood life. But what about the relationship between such places and economic activity? Data on U.S. business registrations between 1990 and 2022 from the Startup Cartography Project to examine whether the opening of a Starbucks in a neighborhood with no previous cafés affects local entrepreneurship. The researchers hypothesize that Starbucks can boost entrepreneurship through two mechanisms: network building and signaling. Starbucks’s business model, inspired by European cafés, provides a social setting for individuals to congregate, in contrast to typical U.S. coffee shops of the 1980s that focused primarily on selling food and drink. Additionally, the introduction of a Starbucks may signal that an area is poised for growth, a phenomenon real estate professionals term “The Starbucks Effect” due to the tendency of real estate prices to rise in neighborhoods close to a new Starbucks. Neighborhoods in which a Starbucks opened experienced an increase of 3.5 additional startups per year over the next seven years, an 11.8%, compared to those where a Starbucks had been planned but did not open. When comparing the Starbucks-opening locations to all census tracts without prior coffee shops, the effect decreases to a rise of 1.1 startups.

In the early 2000s, the U.S. had an oversupply of houses, which led to the collapse of housing prices and triggered the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-9. But since then, the notion that the U.S. is currently suffering from a “housing shortage” has been widely accepted by politicians, the public, and the press. Housing costs are high on the worry list for many voters; hence candidates’ eagerness to offer solutions. Economists generally look at prices to gauge when demand is growing faster than supply, but this post focuses on headline-making estimates that try to quantify the shortage of housing. The estimates of the housing shortage most often quoted in the press, by politicians and by White House economists, rely on vacancy rates—the number of vacant homes as a share of all housing units—as a key indicator. Government measures show the vacancy rate rising until 2010 and falling since. These estimates essentially see a vacancy rate lower than a historical norm as a sign of a housing shortage, which puts upward pressure on home prices and rents. This resembles the way economists compare the current unemployment rate to estimates of the unemployment rate that is consistent with stable inflation. Looking across all 290 metro areas, the National Association of Home Builders’ (NAHB) estimate of the 2021 American Community Survey (ACS)finds the vacancy-rate among owner-occupied homes dropped below 0.9% and rental vacancy rates hit 5.2%, the lowest level recorded since the ACS began generating these data in 2005. The NAHB estimates that in metro areas with very low vacancy rates (that is, not counting communities with abnormally high vacancy rates), it would take 1.5 million units (800,000 rental and 750,000 for sale) to restore “long-run equilibrium.”

This report describes differences in the experience of family food insecurity in the past 30 days among working adults ages 18–64 by selected work conditions. In 2021, 4.4% of working adults ages 18–64 lived in families experiencing food insecurity. Differences in family food insecurity by work conditions persisted even after adjusting for potential confounders. After adjustment, those working rotating or other types of shifts were more likely to report family food insecurity (5.7%) compared with day shift workers (4.0%). Workers who reported that it was very difficult or somewhat difficult to change their work schedule were more likely to experience family food insecurity (6.3%) than workers who reported it was very easy or somewhat easy to change their work schedule (3.8%). Food insecurity also varied by monthly change in earnings, from 3.9% among workers whose earnings did not change to 5.5% among workers whose earnings changed at least a moderate amount from month to month.

The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness (PATH) program provides services for people with serious mental illness, or co-occurring mental illness and substance use disorders, who are also are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of soon becoming homeless. The Triennial Process Evaluation uses data from 2019, 2020, and 2021 to understand the services provided by grantees. The evaluation conclusions include that (1) staff retention and extensive data requirements for PATH are the two most prevalent issues for service provider agencies interviewed for this report; and (2) the lack of affordable housing options for PATH clients presents a hard limit to the effectiveness of PATH services. Stable housing is a critical social determinant of mental health, even more so for older adults with mental illness. When housing options are scarce, PATH clients are less likely to achieve housing stability and less likely to fully benefit from mental health services.