Scholars within different disciplines employ a wide range of empirical approaches to understanding how, why and with what consequences government is organized. We first review recent statistical modeling efforts in the areas of education, job-training, welfare reform and drug abuse treatment and...

Using a representative sample of African American adolescent girls in impoverished urban neighborhoods in Chicago, we consider income-related predictors (poverty, financial strain, welfare receipt, and welfare exposure) of adolescents' job preparation and nonmarital childbearing risk. The most...

In this paper, we focus on how welfare-reliant mothers view work-family trade-offs in the age of welfare reform. We use data from in-depth, qualitative interviews with approximately 80 welfare-reliant mothers living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in Philadelphia and Cleveland. These...

This paper examines the impacts of work experience acquired while youth were in high school (and college) on young men’s wage rates during the 1980s and 1990s. Previous studies have found evidence of sizeable and persistent rates of return to working while enrolled in school, especially high...

A recent report of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) examined the effect of pre- PRWORA waiver activity in the early 1990s on the AFDC caseload, and found that waivers made a substantial contribution to the reduction in the AFDC caseload although less than that of the declining unemployment...

In recent years, women have made considerable gains relative to men in the labor market. Most notably, the gender gap in hourly wages has narrowed substantially. In this paper we divide workers into three skill groups on the basis of education, and analyze how the hourly earnings of women in...

In this paper we review evidence from previous studies of job and employment instability among less-educated young workers, and we provide some new evidence from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Our results indicate that early employment instability contributes somewhat to the low...

The rapid reduction in Aid to Families with Dependent Children caseloads during its last two years, and the continued decline of participation following its replacement by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, raise the question of how families who no longer receive cash assistance are...

The relationship between parenting style and adolescent functioning was examined in a sample of 302 African American adolescent girls and their mothers who live in impoverished neighborhoods. Although previous research has found that authoritative parenting, as compared to authoritarian,...

The Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA), enacted in 1982 as a major initiative of the Reagan Administration, created what became a $5 billion federally-funded employment and training program for disadvantaged workers. The JTPA directs the states to provide services to "those who can benefit...