Transitory fluctuations in earnings have adverse consequences for the poor because of limited ability to smooth consumption. This paper investigates job instability and its consequences on earnings and income using 5 SIPP panels spanning 1983-1995. The paper discusses results for married men,...

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...

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...

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 explores the claim that college-educated workers are increasingly likely to be in “non-college” occupations. We provide a conceptual framework that gives analytical content to the previously vague distinction between college and non-college jobs. This framework is used to show...

Studies of the types of women who are still on the welfare rolls, subsequent to welfare reform, are less common than studies of the types of women who have left the rolls. The conventional wisdom is that more skilled women have left the rolls and therefore that less skilled women remain on...

The authors discuss a number of issues related to time limits on benefit receipt. Although time limits have a very short history as a serious policy alternative to welfare reform development of the 1990's, the authors review scant existing evidence to raise several important discussions. The...

A recent report of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) examined the effect of pre- PRWORA waiver activity in the early 1990s on the AFDC caseload, and found that waivers made a substantial contribution to the reduction in the AFDC caseload although less than that of the declining unemployment...