In this chapter I provide a brief history of the TANF program, including changes made as part of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. I then present a variety of program statistics, including trends in aggregate and state-level caseloads and spending, along with changes in the demographic composition...

In this paper, we use household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of new saving incentives that were implemented as part of the overhaul of U.S. welfare policy during the mid-1990s on the saving of households at risk of entering welfare. The Temporary...

A prominent theoretical controversy in the compensating differentials literature concerns unobservable individual productivity. Competing models yield opposite predictions depending on whether the unobservable productivity is safety-related skill or productivity generally. Using five panel waves...

Our research examines empirically the age pattern of the implicit value of life revealed from workers' differential wages and job safety pairings. Although aging reduces the number of years of life expectancy, aging can affect the value of life through an effect on planned life-cycle...

We assemble a new matched employer-employee data set covering essentially all industries and occupations across all regions of the U.S. We use this data set to re-examine the question of the relative contributions to the overall sex gap in wages of sex segregation vs. wage differences by sex...

We report new evidence on the existence of sex discrimination in wages and whether competitive market forces act to reduce or eliminate discrimination. Specifically, we use plant- and firm-level data to examine the relationships between profitability, growth and ownership changes, product market...

We examine the possible sources of the larger racial and ethnic wage gaps for men than for women in the U.S. Specifically, using a newly created employer-employee matched data set containing workers in essentially all occupations, industries, and regions, we examine whether these wage...

We use a unique new data set that combines individual worker data with data on workers' employers to estimate plant-level production functions and wage equations, and thus to compare relative marginal products and relative wages for various groups of workers. The data and empirical framework...

In this paper, we exploit plant-level data for U.S. manufacturing for the 1970s and 1980s to explore the connections between changes in technology and the structure of employment and wages. We focus on the nonproduction labor share (measured alternatively by employment and wages) as the variable...