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...

This paper presents an optimization model for evaluation of alternative spatial configurations of rent-subsidized housing in a large metropolitan area as well as associated monetary and nonmonetary impacts. Groups affected by these configurations include residents of subsidized housing, owners...

In this paper I present evidence on the extent to which labor market tightness, and measured by job vacancy rates and other indicators of hiring difficulty, affect the willingness of establishments to hire welfare recipients. From these estimates, I infer the effects of the business cycle on the...

In response to increases in cohabitation in the United States, researchers have recently focused on differences between cohabiting and marital unions. One of the more consistent findings in this emerging literature has been a higher rate of domestic violence among cohabiting couples. A prominent...