Means-tested and social insurance programs in the U.S. have been transformed over the last 25 years, with expansions in Medicare and Medicaid, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Supplemental Security Income, and with contractions in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. We examine the effect...

A long literature in economics studies differential allocations of resources to children within the family. In a study of approximately 1,600 very disadvantaged households with children in three cities in the U.S. from 1999 to 2005, significant differences in levels of food allocation, as...

We provide a new examination of the incentive effects of welfare rules on family structure among low-income women by emphasizing that the eligibility and benefit rules in the AFDC and TANF programs are based more on the biological relationship between the children and any male in the household...

There has long been interest in the extent to which effects of social stratification extend and persist across generations. We take a novel approach to this question by asking whether birth order and sibling group size in the parental generation influences the educational attainment of their...

For decades, geneticists and social scientists have relied on sibling correlations as indicative of the effects of genes and environment on behavioral traits and socioeconomic outcomes. The current paper advances this line of inquiry by exploring sibling similarity across a variety of...

The stylized fact that individuals who come from families with more children are disadvantaged in the schooling process has been one of the most robust effects in human capital and stratification research over the last few decades. For example, Featherman and Hauser (1978: 242-243) estimate that...

Caspi et al. (2002, 2003), Guo et al. (2008a), and Pescosolido et al. (2008) all claim to have demonstrated allele-by-environment interactions, but in all cases environmental influences are potentially endogenous to the unmeasured genetic characteristics of the subjects and their families. Thus,...