Using data collected in 2000 on a racially and ethnically diverse sample of high school seniors (typically 17-18 years old), this study analyzes teenagers’ expectations and desires about marriage, having children, and becoming unwed parents. The study is the first to examine all six outcomes...

Can state income transfers contribute to economic development? This essay concludes: maybe, and cautions against a full-speed-ahead approach to converting income transfers into economic development tools. Recent policy initiatives involving unemployment insurance and welfare programs generally...

"The foster care system attempts to prepare children and youth who have suffered child maltreatment for successful adult lives. This study documents the economic advantages of a privately funded foster care program that provided longer term, more intensive, and more expensive services compared...

The five papers in this symposium advance the vital task of disaggregating the impacts of welfare reform. Four report differences across groups defined by location (rural or urban), types of TANF-eligible family, type of family structure, and race and ethnicity. The fifth reports few differences...

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement...

Using data from the youngest cohorts of women in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this study constructs Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) histories starting at age 15. Most young women go on AFDC for the first time between ages 18 and 25 and do so in the first few years...

Why do we distribute income to the poor through government programs? Spokespersons for the median voter/interdependent preferences and interest group approaches to public policy determination present simple competing models. Their listener observes that the two models, based on quite different...

Using data collected in 2000 on a racially and ethnically diverse sample of high school seniors (typically 17-18 years old), this study analyzes teenagers' expectations and desires about marriage, having children, and becoming unwed parents. The study is the first to examine all six outcomes...