We assess the impact on family functioning and child well-being of the New Hope Project, a random-assignment anti-poverty program. New Hope's treatment provides job-search assistance, wage supplements that raise income above the poverty threshold, and subsidies for health insurance and child...

This paper has been published as: Bruce Meyer and Dan Rosenbaum. 2000. "Making Single Mothers Work: Recent Tax and Welfare Policy and Its Effects," National Tax Journal 53(4, part 2): 1027-1062. <p> We describe the enormous changes in social and tax policy in recent years that have encouraged work...</p>

Our purpose in this paper is to speculate on the cyclicality of state fiscal responses under welfare reform. In particular, how will they respond during the next recession? We draw lessons from several literatures and present some new evidence. An important literature estimates the spending...

". . . that the labor force status of an individual will be affected by his health is an unassailable proposition [because] a priori reasoning and casual observation tell us it must be so, not because there is a mass of supporting evidence." (Bowen and Finegan, 1969)<p> "Despite the near universal...</p>

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness, both in terms of medical care expenditures and lost income from reduced labor supply and productivity. As a result, families may not be able to smooth their consumption over...

We study the problem of unemployment benefit provision when the family is also a provider of social insurance. As a benchmark, a simple model is presented where risk-sharing motives govern intra-family transfers and more generous unemployment benefits, provided by the State, crowd out family...

This paper presents a model of prosecutors' decision-making processes in which prosecutors (both federal and state) internalize some of the benefits of reducing crime, but also carte about developing their own human capital. Since U.S. attorneys make their decisions first, they have the...

Given a choice between spending more money on medical care or on other consumption goods, which should society choose? Should the National Institutes of Health devote a larger part of its research budget to AIDS or to cancer? Has the increased inequality of income in the United States led to...

Using a sample of women with children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I look at the effects of receipt of AFDC assistance between 1968 and 1972 on attitudes and behaviors measured in 1972. I also look at the effect of AFDC receipt on the women’s hours worked and economic status up to...

In this paper, we consider the potential impact of moving off of welfare and of entering the work force (both separately and together) upon the wellbeing of parents and children. Our premise is that the new welfare policies limiting the availability of public assistance and mandating increased...