The rapid decline in the welfare caseload remains a subject of keen interest to both policymakers and researchers. In this paper, I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation spanning the period from 1986 to 1999 to analyze how the economy, welfare reform, the Earned Income Tax...

To combat a growing obesity problem, Mexico imposed a nationwide tax on drinks with added sugar, popularly referred to as a "soda tax," effective January 2014. I analyze data on taxed and untaxed products collected as part of Mexico's Consumer Price Index program to estimate how prices responded...

Social experiments frequently exploit data from administrative records. However, most administrative data systems are state-specific, designed to track earnings or benefit payments among residents within a single state. Once an experimental participant moves out of state, his earnings and...

Forecasting welfare caseloads, particularly turning points, has become more important than ever. Since welfare reform, welfare has been funded via a block grant, which means that unforeseen changes in caseloads can have important fiscal implications for states. In this paper I develop forecasts...

An important analytical obstacle is the sample selection problem. Since non-employment levels are high and workers are unlikely to represent a random sample from the population of former recipients, estimates that fail to account for sample selection could be seriously biased

Of all of the welfare reforms that were implemented during the 1990's, time limits may represent the single greatest break from past policy. This paper expands on what is known about this important welfare reform measure by exploiting the predictions from Grogger and Michalopoulos (1999) to...

During the 1990s many states extended Medicaid eligibility to low-income parents who were not receiving welfare. We evaluate the effects of those expansions on health insurance coverage. To account for unobservable differences between expansion states and non-expansion states that may be...

This study investigates how being exposed to a field of study influences students' major choices. We exploit a natural experiment at a Swiss university where all first-year students face largely the same curriculum before they choose a major. An important component of the first-year curriculum...

We use data from the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates to examine the post-degree location choices of foreign-born students receiving PhDs from US universities in science and engineering. Over the period 1960 to 2008, 77% of foreign-born S&E PhDs state that they plan to stay in the United States....

The wage impact of immigration depends crucially on the elasticity of substitution between similarly skilled immigrants and natives and the elasticity of substitution between high school dropouts and graduates. This paper revisits the estimation of these elasticities. The U.S. data indicate that...