We examine the incentive effects of transfer programs using a unique policy episode. Prior to 1989, social assistance recipients without children in Quebec who were under age 30 received benefits 60 percent lower than recipients older than 30. We use this sharp discontinuity in policy to...

Employment and participation rates for US prime age women rose steadily during the second half of the 20th century. In the last 30 years, however, those rates stagnated, even as employment and participation rates for women in other industrialized countries continued to rise. I discuss the role...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of federal welfare reform on the employment, hours of work and marriage rates of three groups of low-educated women: foreign-born citizens, foreign-born non-citizens and native-born citizens. Among non-citizens, we investigate whether the behavioral...

Developmental disabilities are not rare among U.S. children and rates have been increasing in recent decades. The increases have been driven by cognitive and behavioral disorders. While some studies have investigated the effects of specific childhood conditions, particularly ADHD, on adult...

Rising female labor force participation and recent changes to the welfare system have increased the importance of child care for all women and, particularly, the less-skilled. This paper focuses on the child care decisions of women who differ by their skill level and the role that costs play in...

The economies of the less developed countries are about to face perhaps the greatest challenge in their histories: generating a sufficient number of jobs at reasonable wages to absorb their rapidly growing populations into productive employment. In terms of absolute magnitude, this challenge has...

This paper examines the relative importance of timing and persistence elements in explaining cyclical fluctuations in labor supply. Data from the natural experiment provided by World War I1 and cross-sectional data on American local labor markets, as well as aggregate time-series data are used...

In this paper, the added worker effect is interpreted as a response to uncertain returns to labour supply offers by members of a household. A model of household labour supply is developed In which each member's current labour force status affects the job search and participation decisions of the...

This paper analyzes the school enrollment and labor supply decisions of teenagers and young adults as jointly deter-mined outcomes. The empirical results are based on an application of discrete multivariate analysis to a sample taken from the Survey of Income and Education. Higher relative wage...

In the last twenty years the labor force participation rates of 45 to 54-year-old men have fallen 10.6 percentage points among non-whites and 4.4 percentage points among whites. I find that nearly half of this puzzling decline can be explained by the growth of the Social Security Disability...