This paper assesses the short-run impact of first-year maternal employment on low-income children's cognitive development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the U.S.'s welfare work requirement rules - namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions - as a source of...

We investigate whether the decision to experiment with novel policies is influenced by electoral incentives. Our empirical setting is the U.S. welfare reform in 1996, which marked the most dramatic shift in social policy since the New Deal. We find that electoral incentives matter: governors...

Divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock. I investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in US states between 1978 and 2010. Panel data regressions show that under divided government a US state is...

Machine generated contents note: 1 Welfare Reform: An Agenda for Reauthorization -- Ron Haskins and Rebecca M. Blank -- Part II: The Biggest Issues -- 2 Implementation of the Personal Responsibility -- Act of 1996 -- Thomas L. Gais, Richard P? Nathan, Irene Lurie, -- and Thomas Kaplan --...