Home-based work differs from other employment because the work site is the home itself. This difference means that the fixed costs of working at home are less than the fixed costs of working on site and that home-based workers may engage in joint market ...

The wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980. It has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools. To test this hypothesis, we assembled data on ...

This paper uses a choice-based model to estimate the effects of a broad set of economic factors, including AFDC benefit levels, husband's earnings, and a woman's wage rate, on the probability of marital dissolution. We find that the probability of divorce is lower for marriages in which the...

Using data from the ninth wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, changes in the wage effects of marital status and number-of-children for workers of the same race and sex are analyzed as more refined measures of work experience, training, and labor force attachment are substituted for...

Linkages in the across-time unemployment experiences of adult men are the focus of this paper. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data, the paper first documents the strong persistence in unemployment for adult men. It then explores possible explanations for this persistence, searching for...

Following recent work by Rosenzweig (1999), this paper reexamines the effect of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits on nonmarital childbearing through age 22. Unlike most previous work, Rosenzweig finds a statistically significant and quantitatively large positive AFDC...

How much of the income-based gaps in cognitive ability and academic achievement could be closed by a two-year, center-based early childhood education intervention? Data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), which randomly assigned treatment to low-birth-weight children from both...

Families originally living in public housing were assigned housing vouchers by lottery, encouraging moves to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates. Although we had hypothesized that reading and math test scores would be higher among children in families offered vouchers (with larger effects...