"There Is a Big Question Mark": Managing Ambiguity in a Moroccan Maternity Ward.

In Morocco, where extramarital sex and abortion are illegal, single mothers' ambiguous status before the law inflects medical decision-making. Leaky boundaries between the court and the hospital required doctors and administrators to work with multiple forms of documentation while anticipating external surveillance. Gaps between everyday experience and legalized forms of identity created confusion across multiple institutions. When discussing single mothers, hospital staff often spoke of "question marks" that flagged tensions between legibility and liability, disappearance and documentation. Managing question marks ramified surveillance and categorization. Ultimately, however, attempts to administratively resolve single mothers' ambiguity created gaps and inconsistencies that allowed vulnerable patients to disappear from view.

Welfare Reform and Labor Force Exit by Young, Low-Skilled Single Males.

While the labor market woes of low-skilled male workers in the United States over the past several decades have been well documented, the academic literature identifying causal factors leading to declines in labor force participation (LFP) by young, low-skilled males remains scant. To address this gap, I use the timing and characteristics of welfare-reform policies implemented during the 1990s and fixed-effects, instrumental variable regression modeling to show that policies seeking to increase LFP rates for low-skilled single mothers inadvertently led to labor force exit by young, low-skilled single males. Using data from the Current Population Survey and a bundle of work inducements enacted by states throughout the 1990s as exogenous variation in a quasi-experimental design, I find that the roughly 10 percentage point increase in LFP for low-skilled single mothers facilitated by welfare reform resulted in a statistically significant 2.8 percentage point decline in LFP for young, low-skilled single males. After conducting a series of robustness checks, I conclude that this result is driven entirely by white males, who responded to welfare-reform policies with a 3.7 percentage point decline in labor supply. Young black males, as well as other groups of potentially affected workers, appear to be uninfluenced by the labor supply response of less-educated single mothers to welfare reform. Impacts on young, single white males are large and economically significant, suggesting that nearly 150,000 males departed the formal labor market in response to directed welfare-reform policies.

Randomized control trial: Online parent program and waiting period for unmarried parents in Title IV-D court.

Despite a lack of research on parent education programs for unmarried parents, many judicial officers mandate participation. We recruited an understudied sample likely at high risk for negative outcomes-182 court cases involving unmarried parents on government assistance in which paternity was contested and then established via genetic testing ordered by the court. This 2 × 2 randomized controlled trial evaluated the impact on initial litigation outcomes of two factors: (a) participation in an online parent education program or not and (b) having a waiting period between the establishment of paternity and the court hearing concerning child-related issues or not. Using an intent-to-treat framework, we found that among cases not assigned to the program, there was no difference in the rate of full agreement on child-related issues (e.g., child support, custody, parenting time) when comparing cases assigned to a waiting period and cases not assigned to a waiting period. In contrast, for cases assigned to the program, cases also assigned a waiting period were less likely to reach a full agreement than cases that had their hearing on the same day. In addition, cases in the "program and waiting period" condition were less likely to return to court for their hearing than cases in the "no program and waiting period" condition. In exploratory analyses of the subsample of cases in which both parents were present at the court hearing, the pattern of results remained the same, although the findings were no longer statistically significant.

Children abandoned and taken back: children, women, and families in dire straits in Lyon in the nineteenth century.

Abandoning a child was no rare deed in European towns in the nineteenth century, mostly among single women in underprivileged environments. On the other hand, taking this same child back was more unusual. By analyzing the registers of the Lyon hospitals, it is possible to determine the percentage of children taken back by their mothers, how this was actually achieved, and to examine the family status of the mothers at the time of both events. Both of these acts -- abandoning a child and then taking it back -- can be put back in their context in these women's lives, for instance, by looking into the length of time separating the two procedures. To finish with, it appears that the 'Hospices civils de Lyon' encouraged mothers to take the children back and generally had a conciliatory attitude toward them, supposedly in the children's interest.

Preschool and maternal labor market outcomes: evidence from a regression discontinuity Design.

In developing countries, employment rates for mothers with young children are relatively low. This study analyzes how maternal labor market outcomes in Argentina are affected by the preschool attendance of their children. Using pooled household surveys, we show that 4-year-olds with birthdays on June 30 have sharply higher probabilities of preschool attendance than children born on July 1, given enrollment-age rules. Regression-discontinuity estimates using this variation suggest that preschool attendance of the youngest child in the household increases the probability of full-time employment and weekly hours of maternal employment. We find no effect of preschool attendance on maternal labor outcomes for children who are not the youngest in the household.

Nonmarital births and state abortion policies.

This study examines the impact of various restrictive abortion laws on nonmarital childbearing since the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill. The empirical results find that the price of an abortion, a Medicaid funding restriction, and a waiting period law are associated with a decrease in a state's nonmarital birthrate. The negative effects of restrictive abortion laws on a state's nonmarital birthrate are found to occur in various age groups. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that restrictive abortion laws induce unmarried women to change their level of unprotected sexual activity or contraceptive behavior, thereby reducing the likelihood of an unwanted nonmarital pregnancy.

Effects of earnings-supplement policies on adult economic and middle-childhood outcomes differ for the "hardest to employ".

Data from the Minnesota Family Investment Program and the New Hope demonstration were used to determine whether experimental effects of antipoverty policies differ by parents' risk for nonemployment. Using propensity score analysis, increases in employment and income were largest in the harder-to-employ halves of both samples. However, only children in the moderately hard-to-employ quartiles (50th to 75th percentile) consistently showed improvements in school and behavior outcomes. The very-hardest-to-employ 25% experienced decreases in school engagement, and increases in aggressive behaviors, despite substantial increases in parental employment and income. In this group, increases in maternal depression, reductions in regular family routines, and smaller increases in job stability and center-based child care occurred. These factors may have counteracted the potential benefits of increased income on children.

Your next pediatric patient may not be getting needed child support payments.

The author reviews the personal problems faced by children in single-parent and divorced-parent households, emphasizing the altered economic realities accompanying the dissolution of a marriage or the birth of a child to an unwed mother.