The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage. The pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided...

Relatively little is known about the impact of welfare reform on children's living arrangements, which was an important focus of reformers. We use data from the March CPS to examine this question. Our findings suggest three main conclusions. First, welfare reform in some cases has had large...

In this article we propose a variance estimator for the OLS estimator as well as for nonlinear estimators such as logit, probit, and GMM. This variance estimator enables cluster-robust inference when there is two-way or multiway clustering that is nonnested. The variance estimator extends the...

Single-firm event studies play an important role in both scholarship and litigation despite the general invalidity of standard inference. We use a broad cross-section of 2000--2007 CRSP data and find that the standard approach performs poorly in terms of both Type I and Type II error rates. We...

In this paper, we assess whether welfare reform affects earnings only through mean impacts that are constant within but vary across subgroups. This is important because researchers interested in treatment effect heterogeneity typically restrict their attention to estimating mean impacts that are...

We investigate the impact of welfare reform on health insurance coverage and healthcare utilization of single women aged 20–45, using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We present estimates from both difference-in-difference models and...

Little is known about welfare reform’s effects on family structure and children’s living arrangements, an important focus for reformers. Using March CPS data, we find that state welfare waivers are associated with children being less likely to live with unmarried parents, more likely to live...

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First...

Labor market outcomes of welfare reform have been the subject of extensive research by economists, but there has been relatively little work on living arrangements, which was an important focus of reformers. Our research fills that gap by using data from the March CPS to examine the impacts of...