The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act imposed work requirements on welfare recipients. Using 1999-2001 data from Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, we compared the labor market and welfare experience of women with four employment barriers: poor mental health,...

Voting is an important form of civic participation in democratic societies but a fundamental right that many citizens do not exercise. This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the U.S. in the 1990s on voting of low income women. Using the November Current Population Surveys with...

We investigate the effects of broad-based work incentives on female crime by exploiting the welfare reform legislation of the 1990s, which dramatically increased employment among women at risk for relying on cash assistance. We find that welfare reform decreased female property crime arrests by...

We have used a unique longitudinal database that incorporates information from diverse administrative and research sources to examine the impact of the early stages of welfare reform on poor working families who do not receive cash assistance. Our data are for 2791 working poor families from...

I argue for thinking of program evaluation as a decision problem. In the context of California's GAIN experiment (a randomized trial of a welfare-to-work alternative to AFDC), I show that GAIN first-order stochastically dominates AFDC when considering the choice between the treatment and control...