For those who believe that the 1996 welfare reform bill was mainly oriented toward promoting work, it might be surprising to learn that the bill begins with this line: “Marriage is the foundation of a successful society.” The law provided money for states to implement initiatives promoting healthy marriages. The specifics were left to the states, but possibilities included public advertising campaigns on the value of healthy marriages, marital skills training, and divorce reduction programs. My question in this article is simple: Did this social experiment work?

As a follow-up to our 2016 study, this article presents new findings examining the relationship between same-sex family structure and child health using the 2008–2015 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). After discussing NIHS data problems, we examine the relationship between family structure and a broad range of child well-being outcomes, including school days lost, behavior, parent-rated health, emotional difficulties, and activity limitations.

Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the “systemic” model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s.

We explore the links between social capital and labor market networks at the neighborhood level. We harness rich data taken from multiple sources, including matched employer-employee data with which we measure the strength of labor market networks, data on behavior such as voting patterns that have previously been tied to social capital, and new data – not previously used in the study of social capital – on the number and location of non-profits at the neighborhood level.

In the U.S., nearly 11% of school-age children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and approximately 10% of children suffer from asthma. In the last decade, the number of children diagnosed with these conditions has inexplicably been on the rise. This paper proposes a novel explanation of this trend. First, the increase is concentrated in the Medicaid caseload nationwide. Second, nearly 80% of states transitioned their Medicaid programs from fee-for-service (FFS) reimbursement to managed care (MMC) by 2016.