A fundamental property of a progressive income tax is that it provides implicit insurance against shocks to income by dampening the variability of disposable income and consumption. The Economic Recovery Act of 1981 (ERTA) and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) greatly reduced the number of...

The substantial economic expansion of the 1990s, coupled with the dramatic changes in the delivery of cash assistance in America, may have had differential impacts on welfare caseloads across geographic areas because of spatial differences in the composition of labor-market skills and welfare...

Recent research by the Council of Economic Advisers (1997) and Ziliak, Figlio, Davis, and Connolly (1997) provides substantively different estimates of the impact of the macroeconomy and welfare reform in accounting for the recent decline in AFDC caseloads. In this paper we conduct an extensive...

In this paper, we use household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of new saving incentives that were implemented as part of the overhaul of U.S. welfare policy during the mid-1990s on the saving of households at risk of entering welfare. The Temporary...

In this paper, we use household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of new saving incentives that were implemented as part of the overhaul of U.S. welfare policy during the mid-1990s on the saving of households at risk of entering welfare. The Temporary...

In this paper, we use household-level data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the impact of new saving incentives that were implemented as part of the overhaul of U.S. welfare policy during the mid-1990s on the saving of households at risk of entering welfare. The Temporary...

We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the effect of new saving incentives implemented as part of the 1996 welfare reform on household saving. Economic theory predicts that loosening asset limits will increase total savings for households with a large ex-ante probability...