The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act requires welfare recipients to look for work, has made it much more difficult for nonworking recipients to remain on the welfare rolls, and has made it easier for them to continue to receive welfare benefits if they work...

Forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Affairs 34 (no 1): 2000 <p>A key goal of welfare reform is for recipients to establish stable, long-term work patterns under the assumption that regular involvement in work will eventually improve their well-being. Past research provides little information about...</p>

Using a new survey of a representative sample of single mothers who were welfare recipients in an urban Michigan county, the authors explore how certain employment barriers, often ignored by previous welfare researchers and policy makers, constrain these single mothers' employability. <p> The...</p>

This article uses a new data set to investigate the extent to which differences in work history, on-the-job training, absenteeism, and self-imposed restrictions on work hours and location account for wage differences between the sexes and races. As expected, white men generally had more...

In high school and in college, men and women take significantly different courses. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the National Longitudinal Study Class of 1972, we relate these differences in school content to sex differences in adult wages. Differences in...

This article investigates sex differences in the accuracy of young adults' retrospective reports of parental status using Joreskog's general framework for the simultaneous covariance structure analysis of multiple populations. Results indicate that young women's reports of maternal education are...

Policies directed at alleviating poverty rest on a set of assumptions regarding the demographic composition of the poor and the psychological dispositions of poor individuals. Evidence from a long-term study of a representative sample of low-income individuals shows that poverty is very...

The potential of former AFDC recipients to earn a living wage is central to the success of welfare-to-work programs. Previous studies have found that welfare recipihyphen;ents see little increase in their wages over time. Low wage growth could arise from either low returns to work experience or...

This study uses intergenerational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate the effects of family and community background on men's economic status. It is distinguished from most previous studies by its emphasis on community influences and on influences from poverty and welfare...