With welfare reauthorization imminent, many conservative politicians are suggesting that although states have been successful at moving welfare mothers into paid employment, they have paid too little attention to the second goal of welfare reform - encouraging the formation of two-parent...

In this paper we sort through conflicting theory and evidence regarding the impacts of welfare reform on children’s well-being and development. <p>Our conclusions regarding likely child impacts depend crucially on the ages of the children studied. In the case of elementary-school children, the...</p>

We present evidence that the employment and labor force participation rates of less-educated young black men declined in the 1980?s as well as the 1990?s, despite the very strong economic conditions of the latter period. The secular decline among young black men is much stronger than among other...

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), we find that teenagers living in non-married families are less likely to graduate from high school or attend college, more likely to smoke or drink, and more likely to initiate sexual activity. However, not all non-married...

Households became more geographically segregated by income in the United States between 1970 and 1990. Economic inequality also increased between 1970 and 1990. Using 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census data, I find that an increase in income inequality at the state level is associated with an increased...

This study examines the importance of including immigrants in studies of wealth stratification by race-ethnicity in the United States. We address the uniqueness of immigrants in both our descriptive and multivariate analyses. In the former, we construct a measure of “wealth age” that takes...

This paper studies the accuracy of reported Medicaid coverage in the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) using a unique data set formed by matching SIPP survey responses to administrative records from the State of California. Overall, we estimate that the SIPP underestimates...

This paper explores whether within job and between job wage growth is lower for less-educated workers. While a simple model of heterogeneous learning ability predicts that individuals with low learning ability will have flatter wage profiles, this prediction has been largely ignored in the...

While much of the focus of recent welfare reforms has been on moving recipients from welfare to work, many reforms were also directed at affecting decisions about living arrangements, pregnancy, marriage and cohabitation. This paper focuses on women?s decisions to become or remain unmarried...