This study investigates the effects of maternal participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on birth weight, motor and social skills, and temperament for a national sample of children born between 1990 and 1996 to women participating in the...

Congress justified the recent reform of federal welfare policy in part by citing the increase in the AFDC caseload since the late 1960s. The caseload, i.e., the number of families using AFDC, is determined by the number of families eligible to participate and by the proportion of these families...

It is a commonplace that the past few decades have been a time of increasing importance in the role of women as income providers, both within and outside of marriage. Drawing on data from the 1964 and 1993 March Current Population Surveys (CPS), we document the changing division of income...

This research measures the impact of high school resources on women's educational attainment and earnings. No link emerges between education and school resources, whether measured by the pupil-teacher ratio, spending per pupil, teachers' starting salaries, or books per student. For white women,...

Many children born to mothers who are not married are very poor, and in many instances their mothers do not receive child support. Some excuse this by asserting that the fathers of these children do not and never will earn enough to pay adequate support. But the records of paternity cases that...

We use data from four releases of the Survey of Consumer Finances, 1983 to 1995, to examine credit card use among the poor. The credit card market has expanded rapidly in the general population and, given the often transitory nature of poverty, more and more families may be using credit cards...

When the twentieth century is viewed as a whole, no clear trend in income inequality emerges. Inequality was high and rising during the first three decades and peaked during the Depression. It fell sharply during World War II and remained at the lower level in the 1950s and 1960s. From the 1970s...

In this paper we present data from a new survey of 900 employers in Michigan that was designed to gauge employer demand for welfare recipients. The results show that, given the current tightness of labor markets in Michigan, prospective demand for recipients is fairly high. On the other hand,...

Recent work in economics has begun to integrate sociological ideas onto the modelling of individual behavior. In particular, this new approach emphasizes how social context and social interdependences influence the ways in which individuals make choices. This paper provides an overview of an...