What does economic theory teach that is relevant to thinking about public policy in general and welfare reform in particular? At a very general level, economic theory emphasizes two basic themes. Individuals are rational. Hence, they respond in predictable ways to changes in incentives, for...

Scholars within different disciplines employ a wide range of empirical approaches to understanding how, why and with what consequences government is organized. We first review recent statistical modeling efforts in the areas of education, job-training, welfare reform and drug abuse treatment and...

It is disappointing that numerous studies have not produced more consistent evidence of the long-term effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of early intervention. However, all studies are not created equal, and better studies tend to find larger and more significant long-term effects....

We exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education. Our strategy exploits the fact that families on the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s, while the opposite is...

During 1984-1996, welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers. The Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded, welfare benefits were cut, welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated, Medicaid for the working poor was expanded, as were training programs...

This paper exploits the discrete nature of the eligibility criteria for two major federal expansions of Medicaid to discern the effects of the expansions on Medicaid coverage, overall health insurance coverage, and coverage by private and other non-Medicaid sources. Using data from the Survey of...

With single mothers as the primary beneficiaries of welfare and roughly 20% of working-age welfare recipients living in rural areas, an important research question is whether the employment responsiveness of single mothers differs in rural and urban areas. Using nationally representative CPS...

Using a representative sample of African American adolescent girls in impoverished urban neighborhoods in Chicago, we consider income-related predictors (poverty, financial strain, welfare receipt, and welfare exposure) of adolescents' job preparation and nonmarital childbearing risk. The most...

In this paper, we focus on how welfare-reliant mothers view work-family trade-offs in the age of welfare reform. We use data from in-depth, qualitative interviews with approximately 80 welfare-reliant mothers living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in Philadelphia and Cleveland. These...

The growth of the welfare state in the past few decades coincided with the resurgence of large-scale immigration to the United States, adding a new and explosive question to the already contentious debate over immigration policy: Do immigrants "pay their way" in the welfare state? The available...