We assess the impact on family functioning and child well-being of the New Hope Project, a random-assignment anti-poverty program. New Hope's treatment provides job-search assistance, wage supplements that raise income above the poverty threshold, and subsidies for health insurance and child...

Despite ample theoretical reasons to suspect that neighborhood conditions influence adolescent development and behavior, the task of securing precise, robust and unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects has proved remarkably difficult. This paper provides an assessment of the conceptual and,...

The 1996 welfare reform legislation stipulates a 60-month time limit on total receipt as well as work requirements after 24 months of receipt. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data on the monthly patterns of AFDC receipt during the 1980s and early 1990s, we estimate the number and...

We investigate in this paper the extent to which families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) differ from other families in mental health and the way they organize their time, manage their households, and spend their money. Our data come from two nationally-representative...

This paper uses data from a randomized housing-mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime. Our outcome measures are juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data. We find that providing families...

This paper examines whether residence within high-poverty urban neighborhoods affects individual economic outcomes. Our data are generated by a randomized housing-mobility experiment, with measures of economic self-sufficiency taken from state administrative records. We find that providing...

We assess the impact of stage-specific family childhood income on completed years of schooling using fixed effects techniques to eliminate biases associated with the omission of unmeasured family characteristics. Sibling data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that family...

In this paper we sort through conflicting theory and evidence regarding the impacts of welfare reform on children’s well-being and development. <p>Our conclusions regarding likely child impacts depend crucially on the ages of the children studied. In the case of elementary-school children, the...</p>

To understand the impact of high-poverty neighborhoods on families, we collected data from participants at the Boston site of HUD's Moving To Opportunity (MTO) demonstration. MTO randomly assigned housing vouchers to applicants living in high-poverty public housing projects. The vouchers allowed...