We examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother's receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes. Using data from the matched mother-child file from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that children's...

NOTE: This paper was updated 4/11/2001. <p> This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal...</p>

This paper uses data from a randomized housing-mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime. Our outcome measures are juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data. We find that providing families...

Given a choice between spending more money on medical care or on other consumption goods, which should society choose? Should the National Institutes of Health devote a larger part of its research budget to AIDS or to cancer? Has the increased inequality of income in the United States led to...

A primary goal of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation is to increase marriage rates among unskilled women with children. Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status....

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA) institutes a maximum sixty-month "life-time" benefit window for TANF block-grant recipients, involving TANF beneficiaries actually finding paid employment somewhere in the extant labor force. We believe that this welfare-to-work transition constitutes the...

Devolution of authority over social programs creates a particular challenge for those attempting to assess the effects of this shift in the structure of American federalism. While the increased diversity among state policies may provide fertile ground for exploring the effects of individual...

This paper explores the claim that college-educated workers are increasingly likely to be in “non-college” occupations. We provide a conceptual framework that gives analytical content to the previously vague distinction between college and non-college jobs. This framework is used to show...

This paper examines whether residence within high-poverty urban neighborhoods affects individual economic outcomes. Our data are generated by a randomized housing-mobility experiment, with measures of economic self-sufficiency taken from state administrative records. We find that providing...

Crime has fallen dramatically in the 1990s. While many explanations for this decline have been offered, each of them has difficulty explaining the timing, large magnitude, persistence, and widespread nature of the drop. In this paper we propose a new explanation for falling crime: the...