During the last thirty years, the composition of white and black families in the United States has changed dramatically. In 1960, less than 10 percent of families with children were headed by a single mother, while in 1990 more than 20 percent of families with children were female-headed...

Assured child support benefits are an important component of many proposals to reform the child support system. The authors estimate the likely effects of assured benefits on poverty and welfare participation when (a) parents eligible for child support work the same number of hours as they...

In an effort to standardize the calculation of monthly child support awards, the federal government requires states to use preestablished formulas to determine the amount of awards. However, because of human error, differences in the experience and training of the officials making the...

To policymakers, the major attraction of work and training programs for welfare recipients is that they hold out the prospect that recipients can be moved off the rolls and into self-sufficiency in the private labor market, thereby decreasing welfare costs and caseloads. This paper considers the...

Since the mid-1980s, several important studies have established the statistical relationship between the poverty rate and overall economic performance. Most of these studies focused on the apparent break in this relationship beginning in the late 1970s or early 1980s. In this paper, we present...

Although high school dropout rates have been declining among members of virtually all major demographic groups, the dropout rates of single mothers remain high. This is troubling, given that the author finds that over the last quarter century single mothers who do not graduate from high school...

Recent research has identified situations in which instrumental variables (IV) estimators are severely biased and has suggested diagnostic tests to identify such situations. We suggest a number of alternative techniques for choosing a set of instruments that satisfy these tests from a universe...

In this paper I present evidence on the extent to which labor market tightness, as measured by job vacancy rates and other indicators of hiring difficulty, affect the willingness of establishments to hire welfare recipients. From these estimates, I infer the effects of the business cycle on the...