Female-headed families have among the highest poverty rates of any major demographic group in the United States. The purpose of this paperis to investigate empirically the effectiveness of current child-support enforcement policies and to determine their role in reducing poverty and welfare dependency. A special supplement to the April 1982 Current Population Survey provides the data for the analysis. The results indicate that child support enforce-ment may represent an effective means for re-ducing welfare program costs but isunlikely to have a dramatic effect on either welfare de-pendency or poverty.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of how job search requirements under various government programs influence job search behavior. The analysis indicates that job search requirements exert a significant impact on certain aspects of the job search process, but not those that generally lead to a higher probability of employment. It is also found that persons who utilize intensively search activities that result in direct employer contact have much shorter durations of unemployment than persons who do not utilize such activities intensively. It is speculated that altering job search requirements to include more direct employer contact could lead to a significant reduction in unemployment.

Nancy Brandon Tuma, Philip K. Robins, A Dynamic Model of Employment Behavior: An Application to the Seattle and Denver Income Maintenance Experiments, Econometrica, Vol. 48, No. 4 (May, 1980), pp. 1031-1052

Previous static analyses of the work disincentive effects of welfare programs are extended to a dynamic context. Using a sample of continuous longitudinal labor market histories, estimates are derived for welfare-nonwelfare differences in labor market flows among the states of employment, unemployment, and nonparticipation. The estimates are used to identify the main sources of the lower employment and labor force participation rates and higher unemployment rate of welfare recipients. The findings indicate that welfare programs have substantial effects on virtually every labor market transition examined but that the primary source of the static work disincentive effect is slower entry into employment.

This paper analyzes changes in child-care arrangements of a sample of children from the Youth Cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys over the first three years of life. The analysis indicates that turnover in child-care arrangements is surprisingly low among this sample and is more common among families of higher socioeconomic status. Child-care turnover is positively correlated with mothers' employment turnover, but is not correlated with changes in mothers' marital status or additional births. Turnover in child-care arrangements is highly correlated over time, due mainly to the effects of observed variables and unobserved characteristics of the mothers.

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of child care costs on family labor supply and the demand for market child care. The model is a framework for cross-section estimation of the effects of child care costs on labor supply and child care use. It applies to households having young children requiring continuous care and in which both the mother and 1 other potential child care provider are present. The 3 potential sources of child care are the mother the potential informal provider and the market. Using data from the 1980 baseline household survey of the Employment Opportunity Pilot Projects this empirical analysis uses a subsample of 6170 households in which there is a married woman under age 45 with her spouse present at the time of the survey at least 1 child under age 14 and nonmissing data on key variables. Results show that 1) higher market child care costs discourage women from working even when an informal source of care is available indicating that such informal care is an imperfect substitute for market care; 2) a higher wage rate for the mother encourages her to work thus a higher wage rate increases the probability of using market child care; 3) the number of children requiring care has a negative impact on the probability of the women working with the largest impact caused by younger children; 4) nonwage income has a negative impact on the probability of the woman working; and 5) black women are more likely to work than whites and are statistically more likely than whites to use market child care if they do work. This family labor supply model predicts that the cost of market child care will affect household decisions on labor supply and child care use. Estimates of a qualitative choice model provide strong confirmation that child care costs affect such decisions. The responsiveness of the labor supply of mothers to child care costs demonstrated in this study indicate that such subsidies do have their intended effect of encouraging labor supply. The fact that a large proportion of current child care subsidies benefit primarily middle and upper income families via the income tax credit suggests that the labor supply effets of such subsidies may in practice be stronger for less needy families than for low income families. Employer-subsidized child care may become an increasingly popular tool for attracting mothers into the labor force.

This paper examines how four components of the job search process--the choice of search methods, the choice of how many firms to contact, the rate at which offers are received, and the acceptance or rejection of an offer--influence the job-finding rate. A reduced-form model of job search is estimated that takes account of the fact that users of a particular method of job search are not a random subset of all searchers. The empirical analysis focuses on differences in search behavior between the employed and unemployed. A key finding of the analysis is that the offer rate per contact is greater for employed searchers than for unemployed searchers. This may be due to differences in the effectiveness of search while employed versus unemployed or to unobserved differences in search effort. Further research on this issue is needed because many models of job search behavior are based on the assumption that job search is more effective when one is unemployed.

For many years there has been interest in replacing the existing complex transfer system in the United States with a nationwide negative income tax (NIT) program.' The feasibility and desirability of an NIT, however, depend on its effects on aggregate labor supply (and its cost). Interest in predicting these aggregate effects has motivated considerable empirical research on labor supply. The first studies used existing data, usually cross-sectional, to estimate the parameters of labor supply functions.2 Unfortunately, the range of estimates in these studies is disturbingly large and of limited usefulness to policymakers.3 Consequently, a new approach to labor supply research has been followed social experimentation.4 Several experiments have been funded by the federal government to test the effects of alternative NIT programs on labor supply. The first experiment, the New Jersey Experiment, was conducted in New Jersey and Pennsylvania from 1968 to 1972.5 Other experiments have taken place in Gary, Indiana from 1970 to 1974, and in rural areas of Iowa and North Carolina from 1969 to 1973. The largest and most comprehensive of these experiments began in 1971 in Seattle, Washington and Denver, Colorado and is still taking place. In principle, a controlled experiment affords the opportunity to overcome most of the problems inherent in nonexperimental research, because in an experiment, the budget constraints of individuals are exogenously shifted in a measurable way. In practice, however, the experiments have been beset with their own unique set of econometric problems. These problems include the nonrandom assignment of experimental treatment, small samples, truncation of response, limited duration, participation in other welfare programs both before and during the experiment by sample members, and the selection of nonrepresentative samples.6 In this paper, a methodology is presented that attempts to deal with these problems. Experimental data from the Seattle and *Economists, SRI International. The research reported in this paper was performed under contracts with the states of Washington and Colorado, prime contractors for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, under contract numbers SRS-70-53 and SRS-71-18, respectively. The opinions expressed in the paper are our own and should not be construed as representing the opinions or policies of the states of Washington or Colorado, or any agency of the U.S. government. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Summer 1976 meetings of the Econometric Society and in seminars at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Mathematica Policy Research. Jodie Allen, Yoram Barzel, David Betson, Michael Boskin, Glen Cain, Joseph Corbett, Irwin Garfinkel, David Greenberg, Terry Johnson, Richard Kaluzny, Richard Kasten, Robert Lerman, Stanley Masters, Myles Maxfield, Robert Moffit, Larry Orr, Harold Watts, and Robert Willis provided valuable comments on various drafts of this paper. We are, of course, solely responsible for the views presented and for any remaining errors. Helen Cohn, Diane Hollenbeck, Paul McElherne, Gary Stieger, and Steven Spickard provided expert programming assistance. I Milton Friedman is usually credited with developing the concept of a negative income tax. Robert Lampman and James Tobin (1965) among others also made early contributions to the concept. 2An excellent collection of such studies is presented in Glen Cain and Harold Watts. 3See Keeley for a survey of these studies and a discussion of some of the econometric difficulties that lead to such a wide range of estimates. 4Heather Ross (1966) is credited with first conceiving the idea of an NIT experiment. Guy Orcutt and Alice Orcutt (1968) first published a paper outlining an experimental design. 5The New Jersey Experiment is described in David Kershaw and Jerilyn Fair. Watts and Albert Rees (1977a, b) and Joseph Pechman and P. Michael Timpane present the results from this experiment. 6See Henry Aaron, Keeley, and Keeley and Robins for a critical discussion of many of these problems.