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...

The third Marshall-Hicks-Allen rule of elasticity of derived demand purports to show that labor demand is less elastic when labor is a smaller share of total costs. As Hicks, Allen, and then Bronfenbrenner showed, this rule is not quite correct, and actually is complicated by an unexpected...

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) provides marriage bonuses to some married couples and imposes marriage penalties on many others. The sources of these bonuses and penalties are the EITC eligibility rules, its non-linear benefit structure, and the phase-out of benefits at higher incomes. In...

Cohany and Sok recently reported that the labor force participation rate of married women with children, and especially married women with very young children, declined between 1997 and 2005.  In contrast, recent work by Boushey showed that the negative impact of children on work by women age...

In an important contribution to the literature on the socio-economic impacts of teen childbearing, Hotz, McElroy, and Sanders used a natural experiment based on the random occurrence of miscarriages. They concluded that teen childbearing was actually beneficial to the young women in terms of...

The gender earnings ratio for year-round full-time workers varies substantially across U.S. states, with a range of 24 percentage points. I examine the source of this variation to assess whether it is genuine or reflects compositional differences that vary across state. Using CPS data, I...