The school desegregation efforts following the historic Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) represent one of the most important social policy initiatives of the 20th century. Despite a large research literature on desegregation and educational outcomes, its effects on the...

Beginning in the mid 1980s and extending through the early to mid 1990s, a substantial number of women and children gained eligibility for Medicaid through a series of income-based expansions. Using natality data from the National Center for Health Statistics, we estimate fertility responses to...

This study examines whether maternal employment affects the health status of low-income, elementary-school-aged children using instrumental variables estimation and experimental data from a welfare-to-work program implemented in the early 1990s. Maternal report of child health status is...

Mounting evidence shows that self-care produces deleterious consequences for adolescents in the U.S. Since desscriptive evidence suggests that maternal employment is the primary explanation for adolescent self-care, maternal employment, it is frequently argued, is harming children. Heretofore,...

This paper estimates the effect of a mother’s employment on her teenage daughter’s likelihood of birth. Using data from the United States, the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988, the author finds that teenagers with working mothers who attend relatively wealthy schools are more...

We investigate the influence of changes in demography, the strength of the economy, and social policies on teen birth rates in the U.S. from 1981 to 1999, a period of wildly fluctuating rates. We find that demographic and social policy changes largely counteracted one another during this period...

During the 1990s, states made several reforms to their welfare programs designed to reduce teenage fertility among minors. Among the most prominent of these changes, states started requiring teenage mothers younger than 18 to live with a parent or legal guardian and enroll in high school in...

Over the last 30 years, the tenet of promoting self-sufficiency through work has become one of the primary objectives of many social welfare policies in the United States. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the author asks if a mother's work hours influence her daughter's teenage...