Public concern over immigrants' use of welfare culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Welfare Reform Act (WRA)). Welfare reform radically changed the welfare system in the United States. Its impact on low-skilled U.S. citizens is the subject of...

We revisit the relative merits of employee-based versus employer-based labor market subsidies. While conventional analyses stress the equivalence of these approaches, we find a modest preference for employee-based approaches. Because the population of low-wage workers overlaps, but is not...

This paper examines what public service employment (PSE) has and has not been in the past and what it might be in the future. It tracks a mind numbing number of programs, yet finds reliable evidence sadly limited. Still there seems to be enough data to draw some sharp conclusions. PSE done wrong...

Forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Affairs 34 (no 1): 2000 <p>A key goal of welfare reform is for recipients to establish stable, long-term work patterns under the assumption that regular involvement in work will eventually improve their well-being. Past research provides little information about...</p>

Data are used from a random sample of African-American families living in poor urban communities to address three questions: 1) How well do socialization, supervision, and marital transition hypotheses explain the relationship between family structure and the probability of sexual debut and...

In an industrialized economy, it is nearly impossible to engage in market work while simultaneously caring for young children. Thus, if a mother is to engage in such work, someone else must care for her children during work hours. However, non-maternal child care is often expensive or of poor...

This paper addresses the fiscal behavior of states in response to the Federal Food Stamp program (FSP). The effectiveness of the Food Stamp Program in increasing the economic well-being of recipients is dependent, in part, on the fiscal behavior of states. Because most Food Stamp recipients are...

Recent research by the Council of Economic Advisers (1997) and Ziliak, Figlio, Davis, and Connolly (1997) provides substantively different estimates of the impact of the macroeconomy and welfare reform in accounting for the recent decline in AFDC caseloads. In this paper we conduct an extensive...

Despite concerns about inequalities in the provision of health care in the United States, and despite a considerable amount of previous research, we know little about the distribution of medical services across income or more broadly defined socioeconomic groups. This paper uses a unique data...

The overarching purpose of this theory paper is to contribute to the study, design, prediction, and understanding of the impact of welfare reform on children and families. In forging our conference plan, we believe that welfare reform must be examined within the theoretical and empirical context...