The authors estimate the effect of financial incentives for reenlistment on military retention rates using a stochastic dynamic programming model. They show that the computational burden of the model is relatively low even when estimated on panel data with unobserved heterogeneity. The estimates...

One of the areas of policy research where randomized field trials have been utilized most intensively is welfare reform. Starting in the late 1960s with experimental tests of a negative income tax and continuing through current experimental tests of recent welfare reforms, randomized evaluations...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experimented approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

Welfare benefits in the US have experiences a much-studies secular decline since the mid-1970s We explore a new hypothesis for this decline related to the increase in wage inequality in the labor market and the decline of real wages at the bottom of the market and the decline of real wages at...

Work on estimating the labor supply effects of high marginal tax rates in welfare programs has been hindered by the difficulty of estimating the effects of participation in multiple welfare programs simultaneously. The authors solve this problem by applying methods of simulation estimation to a...

The negative income tax proposed by Milton Friedman represents one of the fundamental ideas of modern welfare policy. However, the academic literature has raised two difficulties with it, one challenging its purported work incentives and the other suggesting the possible superiority of work...

The reform of the cash-based welfare program for single mothers in the US which occurred in the 1990s was the most important since its inception in 1935. The reforms imposed credible and enforceable work requirements into the program for the first time, as well as establishing time limits on...

One of the long-standing issues in the literature on transfer programs for the U.S. low-income population concerns the high cumulative marginal tax rate on earnings induced by participation in the multiplicity of programs offered by the government. Empirical work on the issue has reached an...