Analyzes the extent to which U.S. tax policies reduce the income gap between richer and poorer individuals and contrasts the extent to which these policies alter rankings of individuals in overall income distribution.

The success of public policies often turns on their distributional impacts. Policy analyses often compare inequality before and after the policy change, but such global estimates are sensitive to the ordering of income sources. This article presents a method for estimating distributional effects...

A youth's decision to attend school depends on individual, family, and area forces. A special data source that includes the March 1967 Current Population Survey allowed all three types of variables to appear in the same regression. Separate regressions were performed on youths who differ by...

Child support is a private transfer that is integral to the means-tested public transfer system. Support payments generally lower the budget costs of welfare as well the incentives for parents to participate. The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program, which establishes and enforces support...

With single mothers as the primary beneficiaries of welfare and roughly 20% of working-age welfare recipients living in rural areas, an important research question is whether the employment responsiveness of single mothers differs in rural and urban areas. Using nationally representative CPS...