The Family Support Act allows states to reimburse child care costs up to the 75th percentile of local market price for child care. States must carry out surveys to estimate these 75th percentiles. This estimation problem raises two major statistical issues: (1) picking a sample design that will...

In this paper we develop a survival time model in which the probability of eventual failure is less than one, and in which both the probability of eventual failure and the timing of failure depend (separately) on individual characteristics. We apply this model to data on the tiring of return to...

In this paper we develop a model of an eligible family's decision to take or not to take child care subsidies. This decision depends on the net benefits the family expects to derive from the subsidies over their expected duration. We contend that such a demand-side model for the take-up of child...

In this paper we consider the conditions under which instrumental variables methods are required in estimating a hedonic price function and its accompanying demand and supply relations. We assume simple functional forms that permit an explicit solution for the equilibrium hedonic price function....

In this paper, we consider a number of issues regarding crime prevention and criminal justice. We begin by considering how crime is measured and present both general and specific evidence on the level of crime in a variety of countries. Crime is pervasive and varies substantially across...

We assess the role of child care in the welfare to work transition using an unusually large and comprehensive data base. Our data are for Massachusetts, a state that began welfare reform in 1995 under a federal waiver, for the period July 1996 through August 1997. We find that both the nature of...

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...

Crime, Imprisonment, and Female Labor Force Participation: A Time-Series Approach Robert Witt and Ann Dryden Witte NBER Working Paper No. 6786 November 1998 JEL No. K14, H0 Rapidly growing prison population in the US has led to an upsurge of interest in discerning the impact of this costly...

We study the effects of consumer information on equlibrium market prices and observable product quality in the market for child care. Child care markets offer a unique opportunity to study these effects because of the existence of resource and referral agencies (R&Rs) in some markets. R&Rs...

We study firms' responses to minimum standards and other forms of regulatory intervention on both the probability of exit and the distribution of observable product quality, using firm level data for a nationally representative sample of markets. Our empirical work is motivated by the literature...