For workers employed in the public and nonprofit sectors, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program offers the potential for full forgiveness of federal student loans for those with 10 years of full-time work experience. A year-long waiver issued by the Department of Education in 2021 to address administrative problems in program access…

In 1998, President Clinton signed the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA). Implemented in 2000, WIA replaced the Job Partnership Training Act (JTPA) as the primary federal job training program. Congress viewed WIA as a way to end "business as usual" in the workforce investment system. WIA aimed to transform the employment and training…

Innovation inducement prizes have been used for centuries. In the United States, a recent federal policy change--the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010--clarified and simplified a path by which all federal agencies can offer innovation inducement prizes, thus intensifying interest in how government agencies can most effectively design…

Since the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, performance measurement systems based on short-term program outcomes have been increasingly used to assess the effectiveness of federal programs. This paper examines the association between program performance measures and long-term program impacts, using nine-year follow-up data from a recent…

Recent analyses differ on how effective the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is at improving infant health. We use data from nine states that participate in the Pregnancy Nutrition Surveillance System to address limitations in previous work. With information on the mother's timing of WIC enrollment, we…

We study how the employment effects of enterprise zones vary with their location, implementation, and administration, based on evidence from California. We use new establishment-level data and geographic mapping methods, coupled with a survey of enterprise zone administrators. Overall, the evidence indicates that enterprise zones do not increase…

During periods of high unemployment, many workers exhaust their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits before regaining employment. To help alleviate this problem, Congress created the extended benefits (EB) program, expanding the number of weeks of benefits available to UI recipients in high unemployment states. The EB program operates by…

Support for WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is based on the belief that "WIC works." This consensus has lately been questioned by researchers who point out that most WIC research fails to properly control for selection into the program. This paper evaluates the selection problem using rich data…

This paper uses data from the 1996 and 2001 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to assess the impact of recent policy initiatives intended to increase access to Food Stamps. It finds that reductions in state certification requirements increased Food Stamp participation rates of income-eligible families with children by one to…