The 'Illegitimacy Bonus,' part of 1996 welfare reform legislation, awarded $100 million in each of five years to the five states with the greatest reduction in the nonmarital birth ratio. Three states -- Alabama, Michigan, and Washington DC -- won bonuses four or more times each, claiming nearly...

The 1996 Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act dramatically altered the economic incentive to bear children out-of-wedlock for economically disadvantaged women or couples most likely to avail themselves of welfare programs. We use data from vital statistics and a...

As part of welfare reform efforts in the 1990s, twenty-three states implemented family caps, provisions that deny or reduce cash assistance to welfare recipients who have additional births. We use birth and abortion records from 24 states to estimate effects of family caps on birth and abortion...

This paper analyzes the effects of illicit drug use on the labor supply of a sample of young adults using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The paper investigates whether the frequency and timing of marijuana and cocaine use are systematically related to labor supply. and...

In this study, I examine the effect of drug use on poverty. The main objective of the paper is to provide descriptive empirical information about the relationship between drug use and poverty, and to explore, in a preliminary fashion, the question of whether drug use causes poverty. Toward this...

In this paper, we investigate the effect of federal welfare reform on the employment, hours of work and marriage rates of three groups of low-educated women: foreign-born citizens, foreign-born non-citizens and native-born citizens. Among non-citizens, we investigate whether the behavioral...

A growing literature argues that early environments affecting childhood health may influence significantly later-life health and socioeconomic status. In this article, we present new evidence on the relationship between infant mortality and later-life outcomes using variation in infant mortality...

This article examines how the financial health changes following an individual's enrollment in Michigan's Medicaid program (Healthy Michigan Program, HMP). We use unique data that links credit reports of HMP enrollees to Medicaid administrative data on enrollment and use of health care services....

Evidence of regional variation in health care utilization has been well-documented over the past 40 years. Yet uncertainty persists about whether this variation is primarily the result of supply-side or demand-side forces, and the difference matters for both theory and policy. In this article,...

Evaluating policy changes that occur everywhere at the same time is difficult because of the lack of a clear counterfactual. Hoping to address this problem, researchers often proxy for differential exposure using some observed characteristic in the pre-treatment period. As a cautionary tale of...