Recent welfare reform initiatives aimed at moving recipients off welfare and into the workforce represent the most important change in United States social welfare policy in recent decades. Concerns have been raised that nonmetropolitan heads of single-female families with children, the primary...

This paper uses in depth interviews with the directors of Departments of Human Service Agencies in 29 counties of Appalachian Ohio, a rural area of persistent poverty, to examine their perspectives on the effects of welfare reform on their agencies and communities. We compare these views from...

Updated March 25, 2001 <p> A revised version of this paper appears as "The Collision of Tax and Welfare Politics: The Political History of the Earned Income Tax Credit, 1969-1999." National Tax Journal 53(4) (part 2): 983-1026. For more information see www.ntanet.org. <p> This paper uses the political...</p></p>

Updated March 25, 2001 <p>A revised version of this paper appears as "Measuring the Effect of the EITC on Marriage Penalties and Bonuses." National Tax Journal 53(4) (part 2): 1107-1134. For more information see www.ntanet.org. <p>In 2000, the EITC will increase net marriage penalties by $3.6 billion....</p></p>

Using data from the NLSY97, we construct two measures of poverty using the official definition and The National Research Council (NRC) definition. We estimate the two poverty rates for 1996 for youths 12-16 as 17.9 (official) and 23.4 (NRC), and document the discrepancies between youths...

This paper uses data from the 1990 and 1993 SIPP to examine the labor market experience of workers with disabilities. We first examine wage differentials between workers with and without disabilities after providing detailed controls for job conditions. We next examine the relationship between...

This study addresses receiving AFDC and private support (both monetary and nonmonetary) and their interrelationship among immigrant families with dependent children. Building upon social capital theory, our theoretical framework emphasizes the role of community social capital and hypothesizes...

The committment to public health insurance for children has increased in recent years, leading to two potentially contradictory concerns for public policy: that expanded availability of public insurance may lead families to decline private insurance for their children and that the additional...

The major aims of the proposed research will be to 1) understand the major factors related to unmarried fathers' decisions about work in the underground and regular economies, and 2) begin a preliminary analysis of the extent to which child support enforcement in the U.S. results in the...