The committment to public health insurance for children has increased in recent years, leading to two potentially contradictory concerns for public policy: that expanded availability of public insurance may lead families to decline private insurance for their children and that the additional...

The major aims of the proposed research will be to 1) understand the major factors related to unmarried fathers' decisions about work in the underground and regular economies, and 2) begin a preliminary analysis of the extent to which child support enforcement in the U.S. results in the...

Forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Affairs 34 (no 1): 2000 <p>A key goal of welfare reform is for recipients to establish stable, long-term work patterns under the assumption that regular involvement in work will eventually improve their well-being. Past research provides little information about...</p>

Using administrative data and in-depth interviews, this case study reports on the short-term impact of welfare reform in persistently poor rural areas of central Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and Indian reservations in South Dakota. The regions' significant...

The degree to which minimum wages affect employment has been of interest to economists and policy makers for many years. This interest has stemmed largely from a potential inconsistency between the intent of minimum wage laws and their theoretical effects: the goal of minimum wages is to improve...

In this paper, we assess whether the positive effects of car ownership on employment outcomes observed in past research are causal. We match state data on car insurance premiums and per-gallon gas taxes to a microdata sample containing information on car ownership and employment outcomes...

Data are used from a random sample of African-American families living in poor urban communities to address three questions: 1) How well do socialization, supervision, and marital transition hypotheses explain the relationship between family structure and the probability of sexual debut and...

In an industrialized economy, it is nearly impossible to engage in market work while simultaneously caring for young children. Thus, if a mother is to engage in such work, someone else must care for her children during work hours. However, non-maternal child care is often expensive or of poor...

This paper addresses the fiscal behavior of states in response to the Federal Food Stamp program (FSP). The effectiveness of the Food Stamp Program in increasing the economic well-being of recipients is dependent, in part, on the fiscal behavior of states. Because most Food Stamp recipients are...