This paper characterizes household spending in education using microdata from income and expenditure surveys for twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries and the United States. Bahamas, Chile, and Mexico have the highest household spending in education and Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay have the lowest. Tertiary education is the most important…

This article addresses educational practice as a site for the development of human capital theory. The article considers metaphysical constructions that are broadly typical of educational thought, and shows how they are amenable to economic analysis. Using different Marxist and feminist methods, it discusses pedagogy and the family as kinds of…

In the face of growing international support for recognition of child-headed households, the author poses the following questions: What does the internationally recognised right to alternative care for children entail? Is the recognition of child-headed households as a form of alternative care in line with the Convention on the Rights of the Child…

During the economic crises Nicaragua suffered between 2000 and 2002, a conditional cash transfer program targeting poor households began operating. Using panel data on 1,397 households from the program's experimentally designed evaluation, we examined the impact of the program on household structure. Our findings suggest that the program enabled…

Objective: To determine the effect of Food Stamp Nutrition Education (FSNE) in Indiana on participants' food insecurity and food insufficiency. Design: A single-blind randomized design. A randomized experimental group completed 5 FSNE lessons as an intervention between a pre- and posttest, whereas a control group completed a pre- and posttest…

Capturing the conditions of children of color living in single-parent families has become more complex due to the growing presence of interracial households. This analysis assesses the size and poverty status of single-female headed families housing multiracial children. Using data from the 2000 Census, we find that 9 percent of female-headed…

Declines in support for the male breadwinner, female homemaker family model in recent decades have been thoroughly documented, but research into the way such attitudes change over the life course remains limited. Drawing on panel data and latent growth curve modeling techniques, the study identifies patterns and predictors of attitude change from…

This study examined the role of men's breadwinner status and their gender ideologies in shifting the breadwinning boundary. Data come from a 3-wave panel survey of 522 married men in 1980, 1983, and 1988. A strong effect of men's breadwinner status on their ideologies is found in 1983 but not in 1988, whereas the reversed pattern holds for the…

This paper examines the dynamics of poverty. Previous analyses of dynamics of poverty have either examined only fluctuations in the male head of family's earnings or looked at the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame. A more appropriate way to understand the dynamics of poverty is to define spells of poverty. Using this…

Several recent reports have highlighted the earnings gap between high school graduates and dropouts; however, earnings tell only part of the story. Families rely on income from salary for regular expenses, but real economic security requires accumulated wealth. Education can be the key to higher earnings, but it is even more importantly linked to…

We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate the effect of new saving incentives implemented as part of the 1996 welfare reform on household saving. Economic theory predicts that loosening asset limits will increase total savings for households with a large ex-ante probability of welfare receipt such as female-headed households…

This article presents the results of a study that investigated the level of assets and debts that female-headed households have in comparison to those of married-couple households and other types of households. The empirical results revealed that the amounts of net worth of married-couple households and male-headed households were significantly…

This paper analyzes the sources of disparities in the relative wealth position of Mexican Americans. Results reveal that--unlike the racial wealth gap--Mexican Americans' wealth disadvantage is in large part not the result of differences in wealth distributions conditional on the underlying determinants of wealth. Rather, Mexican Americans' wealth…

Considerable research has been done on the relationship between Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits and family structure. Evidence based on cross-state variation in welfare benefits and family structure indicates some nonzero effect of those benefits on marriage and fertility. It shows that time-series trends in family…

We looked closely at families who remain in persistent deep poverty in the remote rural areas of one state, using welfare reform as the contextual backdrop. We examined the lives of 10 women who have participated in this qualitative research for over 6 years. The woman heading each family was a welfare program participant; she engaged (more or…