Over the past 25 years there has been a dramatic decline in the number of quality jobs located in central cities. This has disproportionately had an adverse impact on the economic prospects of African-Americans. One issue that has been neglected by most urban poverty researchers is the reasons...

Since the emergence of the policy analysis profession in the 1960's, social policy initiatives increasingly have been linked to analytic projects designed to inform policymakers about the potential effects of proposed reforms. In poverty policymaking and other areas, these linkages have taken...

This paper examines the extent of welfare induced migration using 1980 and 1990 Census data. I begin by discussing a number of methodological issues which suggest biases in past methods used to study welfare migration. Using several different methods, I then provide new estimates which avoid...

The federal government spent more than $19 billion on subsidized housing programs for the poor in Fiscal Year 1992. Of this amount, roughly two-thirds was spent on Section 8 housing vouchers and one-third on public housing projects. Although spending on these programs is nearly equal to Aid to...

This article provides recent national estimates of the short-term economic outcomes of marital dissolution for mothers, fathers, and children. In addition, the article estimates the current and potential impact of private child support transfers on the economic well-being of the various parties...

Over the course of the last 60 years, the United States has developed a series of public programs to aid economically disadvantaged people that involve both cash and in-kind assistance. Much of our understanding of public assistance is based on an important body of work examining factors that...

Can public programs effectively reduce the number of births to women on public assistance? In this paper, I examine the provision of family planning services to welfare recipients through the Medicaid program. Previous studies of publicly-funded family planning services in the U.S. have produced...

This piece introduces "social organization theory" to the analysis of drug-law enforcement policy. Social organization theory was developed more than 50 years ago as an innovative attempt to explain criminal behavior. This theory should have revolutionized criminal law policy. Unfortunately, it...

This research is based on the first random survey to address whether women who are experiencing, or who have experienced, domestic violence have lower employment rates than women who have not. Standardized interviews of 824 English- and Spanish-speaking adult women living in a low-income...

The large-scale downsizings of the 1990s has renewed interest in the earnings losses of displaced workers. This study uses administrative data to follow 833,004 workers in California between 1989 and 1994, providing estimates of the extent of losses in quarterly earnings associated with the...