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...

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...

This paper provides novel evidence on the labor-market returns to proprietary (also called for-profit) postsecondary school attendance. Specifically, we link administrative records on proprietary school attendance with quarterly earnings data for nearly 70,000 students. Because average age at...

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...