In recent years, women have made considerable gains relative to men in the labor market. Most notably, the gender gap in hourly wages has narrowed substantially. In this paper we divide workers into three skill groups on the basis of education, and analyze how the hourly earnings of women in...

Between 1984 and 2000, the share of non-elderly adults receiving benefits from the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) programs rose from 3.1 to 5.3 percent. We trace this growth to reduced screening stringency and, due to the interaction between...

This paper attempts to determine whether wage records reported quarterly by employers to state Unemployment Insurance (UI) agencies provide a valid alternative to more costly retrospective sample surveys of individuals as the basis for measuring the labor market impacts of employment and...

Recent theoretical work suggests that means and asset-tested social insurance programs can explain the low savings of lower income households in the U.S. We assess the validity of this hypothesis by investigating the effect of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income women and...

Changes in food insecurity and hunger among low-income nonmetropolitan households that did not receive Food Stamps are analyzed to assess the extent to which the decline in Food Stamp caseloads among these households resulted from reduced need for food assistance versus reduced access to Food...

In this paper, we use newly available data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to investigate the effects of early motherhood on academic and behavioral outcomes for children born to early childbearers. We find that early motherhood's strong negative correlation with children's test...

In this paper we review evidence from previous studies of job and employment instability among less-educated young workers, and we provide some new evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Our results indicate that early employment instability contributes somewhat to the low...

A revised version of this paper appears as "EITC Noncompliance: The Determinants of the Misreporting of Children." National Tax Journal 53(4) (part 2): 1135-1164. For more information see www.ntanet.org. <p>Internal Revenue Service data indicate that $4.4 billion in excess EITC was claimed for tax...</p>

Over the past 25 years there has been a dramatic decline in the number of quality jobs located in central cities. This has disproportionately had an adverse impact on the economic prospects of African-Americans. One issue that has been neglected by most urban poverty researchers is the reasons...

Since the emergence of the policy analysis profession in the 1960's, social policy initiatives increasingly have been linked to analytic projects designed to inform policymakers about the potential effects of proposed reforms. In poverty policymaking and other areas, these linkages have taken...