Declines in the welfare caseload in the late 1990s brought significant change to the lives of many low-educated, single mothers. Many single mothers left welfare and entered the labor market and others re-arranged their lives in order to avoid going on public assistance. These changes may have...

In this paper, I examine the relationship between sibling sex composition and educational achievement. First, I replicate the study of Butcher and Case (1994) using data on a more recent birth cohort. Contrary to the findings of that study, I find basically no effect of sibling sex composition...

This paper analyzes the effects of illicit drug use on the labor supply of a sample of young adults using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The paper investigates whether the frequency and timing of marijuana and cocaine use are systematically related to labor supply. and...

This paper examines the effects of cocaine and marijuana use on the wages of a sample of young adults drawn from the NLS Youth Cohort. The endogeneity of drug use in a wage equation is considered and a 2SLS procedure is implemented. The rather surprising results suggest that for this sample,...

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the effect of child health on marital stability and family structure within an economic framework. We use the 1988 National Health Interview Survey's Child Health Supplement, with a sample of about 9,000 families to test whether having an...

In this paper, we present estimates of the effect of alcohol taxes on employment, hours of work per week, and wages. These are reduced form estimates derived from a structural model linking alcohol use to labor market outcomes. The reduced form estimates are meaningful in two ways: first, they...

Welfare reform has resulted in a dramatic decline in welfare caseloads and some have claimed that a significant number of low-income women may be without health insurance as a result. The loss of insurance may reduce low-income, pregnant women's health care utilization, and this may adversely...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of federal welfare reform on the employment, hours of work and marriage rates of three groups of low-educated women: foreign-born citizens, foreign-born non-citizens and native-born citizens. Among non-citizens, we investigate whether the behavioral...

In this paper, we investigate whether or not recent state and federal changes in welfare policy -- the imposition of time-limited benefits, the use of financial sanctions for non-compliance, and the setting of strict work eligibility rules -- affect the migration of low-educated unmarried women....

We study whether welfare reform adversely affected the health insurance coverage of low-educated single mothers and their children. Specifically, we investigate whether changes in the welfare caseload during the 1990s were associated with changes in Medicaid participation, private insurance...