Many young men commit crime and many are arrested. The author estimates the effect of arrests on the employment and earnings of arrestees using a large longitudinal data set constructed by merging police records with unemployment insurance earnings data. He finds that the effects of arrests are...

Transfer payments to poor families are increasingly conditioned on work, either via wage subsidies available only to workers or via work requirements in more traditional welfare programs. Although the effects of such programs on employment are fairly well understood, relatively little is known...

Among the most important changes brought about by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 are time limits, which provide consumers with an incentive to conserve their welfare benefits for future use. Among forward-looking, expected-utility-maximizing consumers...

Forecasting the Food Stamp caseload has become increasingly important. One reason is the sheer frequency and magnitude of recent fluctuations. Over a span of less than fifteen years, the FSP caseload has exhibited three prominent turning points. The caseload declined from 22.4 million...

Several cities have recently adopted civil injunctions as a means to reduce gang violence. To evaluate the effectiveness of such injunctions, I develop an extensive database of neighborhood-level reported crime counts from four police jurisdictions within Los Angeles County. I construct two...

After 41 consecutive years of increase, out-of-wedlock teen childbearing unexpectedly reversed course in 1991 and by 2002 was 20% below its peak. Explanations for that reversal have proven elusive. In this paper, we present evidence that exposure to legalized abortion in utero for the cohort of...