If the government offered a refundable tax credit for children, national health insurance, and an assured child support benefit to all families with children - poor families as well as nonpoor families - what would happen to poverty, welfare dependency, and other related issues? The authors...

This paper investigates three hypotheses to account for the observed shifts in U.S. relative wages of less educated workers compared to more educated workers during the period from 1967 to 1992: (1) increased import competition, (2) changes in the relative supplies of labor of different...

Promotion of work is prominent in the rhetoric of current welfare reform efforts. The success of welfare-to-work policies is in part dependent on earnings available in employment. In this paper we use Current Population Survey data for the years 1972–1994 to develop measures of potential...

This paper develops and evaluates a model of a mother's choice of kin-provided child care. Little is known about the choice of kin-provided child care, particularly within the context of intrafamily in-kind transfers. Despite this, kin-provided child care is extensively used, and its use affects...

The economic status of single mothers with dependent children has recently been shown to vary greatly according to their living arrangements, a finding with implications for poverty policy and welfare reform. The economic and time resources of single mothers in various living arrangements were...

A survey of AFDC recipients in California shows that income, even when adjusted for household need and augmented by the food stamp grant, poorly predicts hunger or overcrowding among respondents. Families with teenage boys report hunger much more often than their incomes would predict, as do...

This paper examines the role of local labor markets in determining how long families receive benefits from the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Given the current policy emphasis on devolution and reducing the AFDC caseload through employment, understanding the role of...

This paper documents the declining relationship between low hourly wages and low household income over the last half-century and how this has reduced the share of minimum wage workers who live in poor households. It then compares recent and prospective increases in the earned income tax credit...

This paper uses an historical perspective to examine the labor market prospects and the macroeconomic setting facing mothers with dependent children who were (or would have been) enrolled in the old AFDC program, now that their welfare status will be handled by the new state programs in the wake...

A considerable amount of work has been done on the relationship between AFDC benefits and family structure in the United States. The evidence to date—based on cross-state variation in welfare benefits and family structure, often with state fixed effects—indicates that there is some nonzero...