The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) , passed in August 1996, made sweeping changes in both of the major means-tested cash programs for low income Americans, Aid with Families to Dependent Children (AFDC) and the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI). Because the...

In this paper, I estimate the extent of precautionary accumulation using data from a new survey: the US Health and Retirement Study, which samples older households. I account for many determinants of wealth, not only past economic circumstances and expectations about future resources, but also...

Updated March 25, 2001 <p> A revised version of this paper appears as "How Families View and Use the EITC: The Case for Lump-sum Delivery." National Tax Journal 53(4) (part 2): 1107-1134. For more information see www.ntanet.org. <p> We analyze ethnographic data on 42 families? perceptions and uses of...</p></p>

Using a recently released confidential dataset from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), we find some evidence of "white flight" from public schools into privateschools partly in response to minority schoolchildren. We also examine whether "white flight" is from all minorities...

Using the 1979 through 1998 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women (NLSY), this paper provides evidence that women who lived in states with effective child support enforcement, measured by both strict child support legislation and high child support expenditure, were more...

Can economic incentives be used to affect marriage behavior and slow the growth of single-parent families? This paper provides new evidence on the effects of welfare benefit levels on the marital decisions of poor women. Exogenous variation in welfare benefits arises from a randomized experiment...

This research is based on the first random survey to address whether women who are experiencing, or who have experienced, domestic violence have lower employment rates than women who have not. Standardized interviews of 824 English- and Spanish-speaking adult women living in a low-income...

In the last thirty years we have witnessed large increases in the "returns to skill." These changes in the wage structure have renewed interest in increasing the skill levels of low skill workers. Attempts to do this through job training programs have been largely unsuccessful as the wage gains...

The paper examines how well the Food Stamp Program services households in nonmetropolitan areas. It concludes that, overall, the program is at least as successful at serving low-income households in nonmetro as in metro areas. Participation rates among program-eligible households are higher in...

The Boston story is similar to that of other cities but is unusual in two important respects. First, the drop in the homicide rate between 1990 and 1996 has been the sharpest in the nation. Perhaps even more impressive, for the 29-month period ending in January 1998, Boston had no teenage...