We study the relationship between welfare benefits and the time to first marriage and time to next birth among initially unwed mothers. We use twin births to generate random within-state variation in benefits, effectively controlling for unobservables that may confound the relationship between...

The college wage premium for new labor market entrants rose sharply during the 1980s. We ask how much of this change arose from changes in the skill level of the typical college graduate. We find that skills attained prior to college, as measured by standardized test scores and high school...

Economists have long been concerned with the labor market problems of young men. Recently, research has indicated that one-fourth to one-half of all men are active in crime at some point during their youth. Furthermore, joblessness and criminal activity vary similarly by age and race. The author...

Around 1980, the trend toward racial wage convergence essentially stopped. The author asks whether this break in the convergence trend can be explained by school quality. Department of Education surveys provide earnings data for the high school class of 1972 in 1979 and the class of 1980 in...

The authors estimate the short-run and life-cycle effects of unplanned children on unwed mothers by comparing unmarried women who first gave birth to twins with unwed mothers who bore singletons. They find large short-term effects of unplanned births on labor-force participation, poverty, and...

Despite widespread popular accounts that link crack cocaine to inner-city decay, little systematic research has analyzed how the emergence of crack affected urban crime. We study this question using FBI crime rates for 27 metropolitan areas and two sources of information on when crack first...

Studies based on inputs measured at the state level generally report that school expenditures have substantial effects on students' adult wages, whereas studies based on less aggregated measures report small effects. The author uses wage data from High School and Beyond to analyze this...

To study the problem of widespread youth crime, the author analyzes a time-allocation model in which consumers face parametric wages and diminishing marginal returns to crime. The theory motivates an econometric model that he estimates using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth....