Severe wage erosion and rising income inequality during the 1980s and 1990s should have accentuated feelings of self-interest, retrospection, and personal economic hardship among certain socioeconomic subgroups. This study uses data from National Election Study surveys between 1984 and 1994 to...

We investigate in this paper the extent to which families receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) differ from other families in mental health and the way they organize their time, manage their households, and spend their money. Our data come from two nationally-representative...

This survey discusses 8 large federal welfare programs that affect children. The available evidence is incomplete but suggests a consistent story: Programs that target services directly to children have the largest measured effects, while it is more difficult to detect possibly positive effects...

Anthropology attempts to dig deeply into the daily lives of those on the receiving end of government policy to ask social structural questions: what resources families draw on in adapting to economic shocks and how successful that adaptation process really is; how the internal dynamics of a...

A recent study concludes that permissive concealed-handgun carrying (or "shall-issue") laws have sharply reduced crime rates, including the rate of homicide. Their method has been critiqued by several authors. In this paper I report a quite different approach, which exploits the minimum age...

Social security system old age insurance systems are devices for the sharing of income risks of elderly people with others. Risks can be shared intergenerationally (with the young of the same country), intragenerationally (with other elderly of the same country), or internationally (with...

What does economic theory teach that is relevant to thinking about public policy in general and welfare reform in particular? At a very general level, economic theory emphasizes two basic themes. Individuals are rational. Hence, they respond in predictable ways to changes in incentives, for...

During 1984-1996, welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers. The Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded, welfare benefits were cut, welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated, Medicaid for the working poor was expanded, as were training programs...

In this paper I present evidence on the extent to which labor market tightness, and measured by job vacancy rates and other indicators of hiring difficulty, affect the willingness of establishments to hire welfare recipients. From these estimates, I infer the effects of the business cycle on the...

Recent theoretical work suggests that means and asset-tested social insurance programs can explain the low savings of lower income households in the U.S. We assess the validity of this hypothesis by investigating the effect of Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income women and...