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...