Identifying effective antipoverty strategies
Youngmi Kim, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Social Work. Prior to joining VCU, she completed her Ph.D. and worked as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo. These opportunities fostered her development of critical insights and skills to uncover the dynamics of various facets of economic deprivation and identify effective antipoverty strategies.
She has evaluated asset-building social policies and programs at both the national and international levels. Asset-building policy is a social investment strategy that supports individuals and households to save and invest for their long-term development, such as post-secondary education, home ownership, and microenterprise. These policies and programs are implemented in the form of matched savings account programs, known as Individual Development Accounts and Child Development Accounts. The matched savings accounts provide institutional supports including matching funds and financial education to reduce barriers to saving for the targeted purposes.
Currently, Kim is collaborating with a research team for Saving for Education, Entrepreneurship and Downpayment for Oklahoma Kids.SEED OK is a statewide randomized experiment with newborn children randomly selected from 2007 birth records in the state of Oklahoma. Research shows that the asset-building intervention significantly increased college savings account holding rates as well as savings amounts for the treatment group compared to the control group over the years since the SEED OK focal children were born. In addition to the direct effects of the policy intervention on financial savings outcomes, she is working to exhibit how the asset-building policy can bring positive outcomes for parents and their children. Her research team is currently focusing on the impacts of the CDA policy on parental educational expectations and children’s socio-emotional development during the early child development stage.
In her efforts to discover a wide spectrum of economic deprivation, Kim is also examining the extent of food hardship experiences during the recent economic recession. She is investigating whether household assets buffered the negative impact of income on food insecurity during the Great Recession and whether the associations vary by race and ethnicity.
Kim aims to advance knowledge in the substantive areas and inform policy and practice through her research dissemination and teaching.
Categories Faculty and staff, Research