The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act requires welfare recipients to look for work and has made it more difficult for nonworking recipients to remain on the welfare rolls. In addition, the economic boom of the 1990s and changes in federal and state policies...

This paper analyzes the relationships of schooling, the skill content of work experience, and different types of employment patterns with less-skilled women's job quality outcomes. Survey data from employers and longitudinal data from former and current welfare recipients are used for the period...

This study uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate the relationship between men's economic status and the characteristics of the families and communities in which they grew up. It is distinguished from most previous studies by its emphasis on community...

Linkages in the across-time unemployment experiences of adult men are the focus of this paper. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, the paper first documents the strong persistence in unemployment for adult men. It then explores possible explanations for this persistence, searching for...

According to human capital theory, women's work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth. We test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals, both past and prospective, part-time work experience, and working in "male" rather than in "female" jobs...

Numerous previous studies have used sibling correlations to measure the importance of family background as a determinant of economic status. The sibling correlations estimated in these studies, however, have been depressed by a failure to distinguish transitory and permanent income variation...