Large increases in educational attainment have resulted in dramatic shifts in the composition of educational groups. Utilizing the 1960-1990 Decennial Census and other data sources, I account for these changes in composition using educational ranks-cohort-specific relative rankings in...

We examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother's receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes. Using data from the matched mother-child file from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that children's...

NOTE: This paper was updated 4/11/2001. <p> This paper presents a framework for the evaluation and measurement of reversal and origin independence as separate aspects of economic mobility. We show how that evaluation depends on aversion to multi-period inequality, aversion to inter-temporal...</p>

This paper uses data from a randomized housing-mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high- to low-poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime. Our outcome measures are juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data. We find that providing families...

The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA) institutes a maximum sixty-month "life-time" benefit window for TANF block-grant recipients, involving TANF beneficiaries actually finding paid employment somewhere in the extant labor force. We believe that this welfare-to-work transition constitutes the...

This paper examines whether residence within high-poverty urban neighborhoods affects individual economic outcomes. Our data are generated by a randomized housing-mobility experiment, with measures of economic self-sufficiency taken from state administrative records. We find that providing...

We assess the impact of stage-specific family childhood income on completed years of schooling using fixed effects techniques to eliminate biases associated with the omission of unmeasured family characteristics. Sibling data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that family...

In this paper, I estimate the extent of precautionary accumulation using data from a new survey: the US Health and Retirement Study, which samples older households. I account for many determinants of wealth, not only past economic circumstances and expectations about future resources, but also...

Updated March 25, 2001 <p> A revised version of this paper appears as "How Families View and Use the EITC: The Case for Lump-sum Delivery." National Tax Journal 53(4) (part 2): 1107-1134. For more information see www.ntanet.org. <p> We analyze ethnographic data on 42 families? perceptions and uses of...</p></p>