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...

This article is a wide-view thought piece which analyzes the interconnections between race, gender, and class, their transformations in recent U.S. history, and their future. It begins by analyzing the process of hierarchical dualism which underlies the economics of race, gender and class. It...

Recent studies have claimed that states with initiatives systems of legislation use this more direct from of democracy to improve productive resource allocation. This paper compares the economic performance of states with initiatives to states that do not have initiatives. We first construct a...

The economics literature clearly shows that the transmission of knowledge diminishes with physical distance, a factor contributing to industrial clustering. This paper investigates how those distances have stretched over time. We measure the physical distance between collaborating inventors, as...

While it is clear that there has been a "regional inversionʺ in American patent activity over the past 25 years (i.e. relative rise of the Northwest and Southwest at the expense of the traditional invention hotbeds of the Northeast and Midwest), the reason is still open to speculation....

Using patent citation data for the U.S., we test whether knowledge spillovers in biotechnology are sensitive to distance. Controlling for self-citation by inventor, assignee and examiner, cohort-based regression analysis shows that spillovers are local but that distance is becoming less...