The decline in the employment-population ratios for men and women over the period 2000-2007 prior to the Great Recession represents an historic turnaround in the evolution of U.S. employment. The decline is disproportionately concentrated among the less educated and younger groups within the...

The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. However, the academic literature has raised two difficulties with it, one challenging its purported work incentives and the other suggesting the possible superiority of work...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experimented approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

Welfare benefits in the US have experiences a much-studies secular decline since the mid-1970s We explore a new hypothesis for this decline related to the increase in wage inequality in the labor market and the decline of real wages at the bottom of the market and the decline of real wages at...

We assess the effectiveness of means-tested and social insurance programs in the United States. We show that per capita expenditures on these programs as a whole have grown over time but expenditures on some programs have declined. The benefit system in the U.S. has a major impact on poverty...

We estimate the trend in the transitory variance of male earnings in the U.S. using the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics from 1970 to 2004. Using both an error components model as well as simpler but only approximate methods, we find that the transitory variance started to increase in the...

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was created in 1996 from what was previously named the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program The TANF program is intended to serve low-income families primarily those with only a single parent present as did the AFDC...

We examine whether handedness is related to performance in the labor market and, in particular, earnings. Though handedness is not found to be significantly related to earnings for the population as a whole, there is a significant wage effect for left-handed men with high levels of education....

The system of means-tested transfers in the US has evolved in important ways over the last decade with significant expansions of Medicaid the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Security Income program and with significant contraction in Aid to Families with Dependent Children now...