Most European governments have universal, consolidated, education-based ECE programs that are available from early in the morning to late in the evening throughout the year. European ECE programs are uniformly of high quality, generally last at least three years, and are funded to serve all...

We provide substantial evidence that placing child care provider inspection and complaint reports on the Internet changed the behavior of child care inspectors and improved the quality of child care received by low-income children. We believe that these results were forthcoming in part because:...

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...

In this paper, we develop and estimate a model of violence between romantically linked men and women. Physical violence is viewed as both a source of direct gratification and as an instrument for controlling the victim's behavior. Our model is a Stackleberg type model in which the assailant...

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...

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...

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...

We estimate reduced form models to discern the effect of state regulation of the quality of center and family day care. Specifically, we consider the effects of the number of mandated inspections, limits on group size and staff/child ratio, and staff training requirements on equilibrium price...

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...

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...