Suchergebnisse

Now that married women are working more for pay than they were three decades ago, are they less likely to volunteer? I use national time diary surveys conducted in 1965, 1975, 1985, and 1993 to document a decrease in the weekly volunteer participation rate of working-age married women, from 16.4% in 1965 to 9.3% in 1993. Changes in observable characteristics explain about 65% of the decrease in married women's volunteer participation from 1965 to 1985. The increased employment rates of married women as well as the changes in their parental status are substantial contributors to the decline in their volunteer participation. Married women's gain in educational attainment is the most important factor to offset the decline in their volunteer participation. However, married women's changing labor force and parental status do not explain why married women's volunteer participation continued to decline from 1985 to 1993.

Despite the benefits of prenatal participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), many eligible women either do not participate or begin participation late in their pregnancies. Using recent nationally representative data, we find that more disadvantaged women are more likely to access WIC and, with some notable exceptions, to participate earlier in their pregnancies. Hispanic women, especially those with language difficulties, enroll in WIC later in their pregnancies. Early WIC participation, particularly among teenagers, is less likely among women experiencing a first birth and depends on the mother's early recognition of her pregnancy. (JEL I18, I30)

A myriad of issues relating to professional sports require knowledge about the determinants of attendance. As sports expand as a cultural phenomenon, legal battles over franchises, player compensation and rights, and public subsidies for sports stadiums will intensify. While attendance at sporting events plays a crucial role in deciding sports controversies such as these, there is a paucity of theory explaining attendance at professional sporting events. Even though baseball is considered the national pastime, relatively little is known about the determinants of baseball attendance. This paper is an attempt to fill that gap through building on the baseball attendance research of Roger Noll.

Food insecurity, defined as a condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food, is a widely used measure of well-being in the U.S. The survey module in the Current Population Survey (CPS) that is used to generate the official U.S. food insecurity measure is also included on multiple waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), offering the first opportunity to answer key research questions on the persistence of food insecurity within and across generations. We assess the validity of the food insecurity measure in the PSID by comparing it to the CPS. We find that, although estimated food insecurity rates in the PSID are lower than those in the CPS, the trends over time in the two datasets are similar, and the rates converge from the 1999–2003 period to the 2015–17 period. Our findings lend credence to the use of the PSID for food insecurity research.

AbstractBeginning in the 1990s, states have received unprecedented flexibility to determine Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility and program administration. We find state SNAP policies accounted for nearly half of the 2000–2016 caseload increase. State economic conditions also play an important role in caseload changes, accounting for almost half of the 2007 through 2013 increase. Within distinct periods of our 1990–2016 data, policy and the economy make different contributions to caseload changes. Policy simulations indicate that mandating states to maintain their 2000 SNAP policies, prior to the greatest expansion in latitude, would have lowered 2000–2016 caseload growth by 38%.