In most states, child support paid on behalf of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants is used to offset TANF and child support administrative expenditures; this policy primarily benefits taxpayers. In contrast, Wisconsin allowed most custodial parents to keep all support...

There is little research on knowledge of the policy rules that could affect individuals, either in general or in evaluations of new programs. The lack of research is surprising, given that knowledge gaps could limit the effectiveness of reforms or lead to incorrect inferences regarding the...

Current debates about the success of TANF reforms have been obscured by the use of inconsistent indicators of success, as well as by measurement difficulties associated with alternative indicators. This paper considers conceptual and measurement issues associated with three different indicators...

The underlying theory behind child support guidelines implies that child support orders should change when the incomes of noncustodial parents change. This paper documents changes in noncustodial fathers' earnings over a five-year period and examines the relationship between the changes in...

This article examines and compares the spatial distributions of new jobs and people across sub-metropolitan areas for Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. The jobs data come from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality and the data on people come from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The...

A recent expansion of the San Francisco Bay Area's heavy rail system represents an exogenous change in the accessibility of inner-city minority communities to a concentrated suburban employment center. We evaluate this natural experiment by conducting a two-wave longitudinal survey of firms,...

In this paper we present data from a survey of 900 employers in Michigan during 1997. The survey was designed to gauge employer demand for welfare recipients. The results show that, given the tightness of labor markets there, the prospective demand for recipients is quite high-employers report...