What role has affirmative action played in the growth of minority and female employment in U.S. firms? This paper analyzes this issue by comparing the employment of minorities and women at firms holding federal contracts and therefore mandated to implement affirmative action, and at...

Nearly half of U.S. employers test job applicants and workers for drugs. I use variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation to study discrimination against blacks related to perceived drug use. Black employment in the testing sector is suppressed in the absence of testing,...

Workers in flexible staffing arrangements - including temporary agency, direct-hire temporary, on-call, and contract workers - are much less likely than regular, direct-hire employees to be covered by laws mandating or regulating workplace benefits. Workers in such arrangements, in turn, are...

This book presents findings based on the American Time Use Survey. This new data set allows the contributors to determine how Americans spend their time, providing a better understanding of everyday life.

This book examines the effects of household structure on youth and young adults and how these effects might have contributed to the negative trends in educational and labor-market outcomes observed for young minorities over time.

This book offers insights into the lives of women in a urban Michigan county who left welfare for work and the role their family decisions play in their labor market decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine work-family conflict among low-income, unmarried mothers. I examine how social capital affects work-family conflict and how both social capital and work-family conflict affect employment. I analyze the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a national...

Will welfare reform increase unemployment and reduce wages? The answer depends in part on how much welfare reform increases labor supply. This paper considers the labor supply effects of the welfare reforms that have occurred since 1993, when President Clinton entered office with a promise to...

Previous studies of the macro-economic determinants of welfare caseloads have had difficulty in explaining changes in welfare caseloads during the last decade or so using the simple macroeconomic measure of unemployment. Because welfare recipients will typically get entry- level jobs, employment...

Workers in rural areas earn lower wages than nonrural workers and previous evidence has attributed these differences to lower returns to worker characteristics. This paper builds on that data by examining racial and gender differences within the broader group of rural workers. While there is...