This paper examines AFDC participation and exit decisions in response to the recent changes in the welfare program. Different reform policies are identified separately and allowed to have varying impacts on current and potential recipients. Making use of the extended panel provided by the...

This paper examines the effect of family composition on juvenile substance use and drug sales using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997. The results underscore the importance of having a father figure in the household in deterring juvenile smoking, marijuana use, and drug...

Since 1992, twenty-two states have enacted family cap provisions into their welfare policies in an attempt to decrease out-of-wedlock childbearing. Using matched data from the March CPS between 1989 and 1998, I construct measures of whether or not a woman is affected and the size of effective...

The 1999 State of the Union Address included a "call to action" to improve school quality and provide citizens with safe streets, schools and neighborhoods through initiatives such as decreasing student-teacher ratios, enhancing teacher quality and offering innovative and after-school programs....

This paper re-examines the welfare magnet hypothesis in the context of welfare reform by redefining both migration and generosity. Due to the intrastate variation in program parameters, migration is defined at the county, rather than state level, and the typical definition of generosity is...

In August 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). This act eliminated Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the largest source of cash assistance available to needy families, and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy...

The current paper looks at the nonmarital teenage childbearing behavior of two cohorts of NLSY women. It constructs a monthly panel of information for the teens from the time they are twelve years old until they have a nonmarital birth, reach the end of their third survey without giving birth,...

In 2009, the Federal Reserve Board implemented a survey of families that participated in the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) to gain detailed information on the effects of the recent recession on all types of households. Using data from the 2007-09 SCF panel, we highlight the variation in...