The Help for Working Parents Plan-developed by Dr. Heidi Hartmann and Dr. Barbara Bergmann in collaboration with the Economists' Policy Group for Women's Issues, which they co-chair - offers an innovative welfare reform program that encouragesjob holding, and sustains working parents and their...

This Dialogue presents the views of four authors, from the US, the UK, and Norway, on the best policies to help lone mothers. Lone mothers face an inevitable dilemma in allocating their time between earning income and caring for their children. The low-earning capacity of women in an unequal...

In our response to the points raised by Linda Gordon, Robert Haveman, Betty Reid Mandell, and Gwendolyn Mink, we describe the Help for Working Parents Plan in greater detail, explaining the advantages of the HWP program over both the current welfare system and the proposed Republican welfare...

How do economists know what they know? In a call for a new empiricism Barbara Bergmann asserts that economists mainly make it up.

It's the low wages, stupid. While so-called experts blame other factors for the dire shortage of nurses, this economist contends that low wages, reinforced by a variety of practices, is the real culprit. Meantime, some moves are being made to solve the real problem.

The implications for gender equality of three regimes are compared: a low tax-low benefit regime, a regime of Basic Income Grants (BIG), and a welfare state offering a generous menu of in-kind and cash benefits concentrated on people with special needs, but not including lengthy paid parental...