Recent welfare reforms are prompting some state and local welfare agencies to use temporary help service firms to help place welfare recipients into jobs. Concerns have arisen that these jobs are more likely to pay low wages, provide fewer benefits, and offer less stability. We explore the...

Temporary Help Services (THS) employment has been growing in size, particularly among disadvantaged workers, and in importance in balancing cyclical fluctuations in labor demand. Does THS employment provide some benefits to disadvantaged workers, or divert them from better jobs? We investigate...

Welfare reform has transformed the U.S. cash assistance program for single parents and their children. Although there remains substantial uncertainty about the importance of reform in producing the subsequent decline in the welfare caseload, even less is known about its impact on the experiences...

State and federal reforms of the 1990s transformed the U.S. cash assistance program for single parents and their children. Despite an extensive literature examining these changes and their impacts, there have been few studies that consider the effects of these reforms from the perspective of the...

This paper provides novel evidence on the labor-market returns to for-profit postsecondary school and community college attendance using a two-step model to avoid recent concerns with singlestage fixed effects methods. Specifically, we link administrative records on for-profit school and...

This paper estimates labor-market returns for students pursuing certificates or associate's degrees in eight broad fields of study at community colleges and for-profit institutions. The data contain 400,000 students beginning their studies between 2005 and 2012 in one state. We estimate two-step...

We evaluate the labor-market returns to General Educational Development (GED) certification using state administrative data. We develop a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) method to account for the fact that GED test takers can repeatedly retake the test until they pass it. Our technique can...

In this paper we estimate the causal effect of children on the labor supply of women using panel data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). We examine the effect of children both prior to and after birth as well as how the effect of children varies with the...

This paper uses administrative data from Missouri to examine the sensitivity of job training program impact estimates based on alternative nonexperimental methods. In addition to simple regression adjustment, we consider Mahalanobis distance matching and a variety of methods using propensity...

This paper provides among the first rigorous estimates of the labor-market returns to community college certificates and diplomas, as well as estimating the returns to the more commonly-studied associate's degrees. Using administrative data from Kentucky, we estimate panel-data models that...