The degree to which minimum wages affect employment has been of interest to economists and policy makers for many years. This interest has stemmed largely from a potential inconsistency between the intent of minimum wage laws and their theoretical effects: the goal of minimum wages is to improve...

The substantial economic expansion of the 1990s, coupled with the dramatic changes in the delivery of cash assistance in America, may have had differential impacts on welfare caseloads across geographic areas because of spatial differences in the composition of labor-market skills and welfare...

Recent research by the Council of Economic Advisers (1997) and Ziliak, Figlio, Davis, and Connolly (1997) provides substantively different estimates of the impact of the macroeconomy and welfare reform in accounting for the recent decline in AFDC caseloads. In this paper we conduct an extensive...