Households became more geographically segregated by income in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Research shows that growing up in a poor neighborhood is associated with worse outcomes for children. This suggests that economic segregation may be harmful to children. Economic inequality...

A common criticism of tax and welfare policy is that these policies create disincentives for marriage, spurring recent calls for "welfare reform" or eliminating the "marriage penalty" in the federal income tax system. These criticisms are lobbied in the midst of a literature with little...

A revised version of this paper appears as "Who are the Ineligible EITC Recipients?" National Tax Journal 53(4) (part 2): 1165-1186. For more information see www.ntanet.org.

In the post-reform era, the production of welfare policy is taking shape in an increasingly devolved and discretionary environment. Street-level workers are "making" reform through their day-to-day practices in public, quasi-public, and private agencies, extending even into the private...

In this paper, tests are made for the effect that the spatial distribution of welfare and Food Stamp caseloads may have on caseload change in the South. Spatial effects are captured by contrasting caseload trends overtime in metropolitan (urban) counties and nonmetropolitan (rural) counties...

This paper describes selected results from qualitative telephone interviews with 130 Minnesota employers who participated in local welfare-to-work partnerships with social service agencies and other community members. Differences among rural and urban/suburban employers are examined and...

It is disappointing that numerous studies have not produced more consistent evidence of the long-term effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) of early intervention. However, all studies are not created equal, and better studies tend to find larger and more significant long-term effects....

We exploit the changes in the distribution of family income to estimate the effect of parental resources on college education. Our strategy exploits the fact that families on the bottom of the income distribution were much poorer in the 1990s than they were in the 1970s, while the opposite is...

With single mothers as the primary beneficiaries of welfare and roughly 20% of working-age welfare recipients living in rural areas, an important research question is whether the employment responsiveness of single mothers differs in rural and urban areas. Using nationally representative CPS...

The growth of the welfare state in the past few decades coincided with the resurgence of large-scale immigration to the United States, adding a new and explosive question to the already contentious debate over immigration policy: Do immigrants "pay their way" in the welfare state? The available...