Low-income families with children receive large tax benefits from the Earned Income Tax Credit, while high income taxpayers receive large tax benefits from dependent exemptions (whose value is greater to those in higher tax brackets). In contrast, middle-income parents receive substantially...

This paper examines the impact of Clinton era social policy changes on the poor. It explores shifts in incentives, behavior, and incomes and discusses the role Clinton did or did not play in influencing the policy mix and the nature of the political debate surrounding poverty. Policy changes...

Scholars emphasize that poverty in Britain has risen sharply since the late 1970s. Meanwhile in the United States, both official figures and traditional poverty scholars report sharp declines in poverty. We seek to provide a comparison of poverty levels in Britain and the US based on a set of...

In contrast to previous studies which have examined the impact of Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on the level or stock of union membership, this paper examines their impact on the most updated flow into membership and the organizing of workers through certified elections. Since detailed annual data...

The paper presents a methodology for studying the sequence and timing of life events past age 65. After estimating models of marital status, disability, living arrangements and income from the scattered segments of old age captured within the 17 year window of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics...

This paper examines the changing employment patterns for young men and women aged 16 to 24 over the 1970s and pays particular attention to the widening racial differences. Between 1970 and 1980 employment rates for both black men and women in this age range fell roughly 14 points relative to...

This paper examines the hypothesis that the extraordinarily highrates of unemployment among black youth can be linked to a geographic mismatch between the residences of black youth and the jobs they might occupy. Chicago's labor market is examined in detail. The paper reports that black youth do...

This paper reviews the current policies for fighting poverty and explores the impact they have had. We begin by reviewing trends in poverty, poverty spending and economic performance. It is immediately apparent that economic performance is the dominant determinant of the measured poverty rate...

This paper explores how the wage and career consequences of motherhood differ by skill and timing. Past work has often found smaller or even negligible effects from childbearing for high-skill women, but we find the opposite. Wage trajectories diverge sharply for high scoring women after, but...

This nontechnical paper was prepared as a background study for the NBER Conference on Youth Joblessness and Employment. Our analysis of data collected in the March 1976 and October 1976 Current Population Surveys leads us to the following conclusions: Unemployment is not a serious problem for...