Beginning with the 1996 federal welfare reform law, many U.S. safety net programs -- not only cash welfare assistance for families with children, but also food stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP, and SSI -- eliminated eligibility for legal immigrants who previously had been eligible on the same terms as citizens. Using data from the Current Population Survey for 1995-2010 and focusing on children, Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes find that among low-income households with children, immigrant households have come to rely more heavily on earnings, and less on the safety net, than native households. Participation in safety net programs has declined for immigrants compared to natives during the period they study, and the declines were largest for food stamps and SSI. Using variation across states in the magnitude of the Great Recession, their results also show that labor market contractions have led to larger increases in poverty rates for children in immigrant-headed households than in native‐headed households.

While very few women ran for mayor of a U.S. city in 1970, about one-third of the elections in the 2000s have involved a female candidate. Using data on U.S. mayoral elections from 1950 to 2005, Fernando Ferreira and Joseph Gyourko find that the gender of the mayor has no effect on policy outcomes related to the size of local government, the composition of municipal spending and employment, or crime rates. However, female mayors appear to have higher political skills, putting them at an advantage as incumbents over comparable male candidates. Interestingly, electing a female mayor does not change the long-run political success of other female mayoral candidates in the same city, or of female candidates in local congressional elections.

Alan Gerber, Gregory Huber, David Doherty, Conor Dowling, and Seth Hill ran an experiment by providing registered voters in Connecticut with information about ballot secrecy protections prior to the November 2010 general election. The researchers find that these letters increased turnout for registered citizens who had not voted before, but not for those who had previously voted. These results suggest that even though the secret ballot is a long-standing institution in the United States, providing basic information about ballot secrecy can affect the decision to participate in elections.

Lucas Davis reviews the recent history of the nuclear power industry and finds that, in addition to concerns about nuclear accidents, proliferation risk, and the storage of spent fuel, a key challenge is the high cost of construction of nuclear plants. Construction costs are so high that it is difficult to make an economic argument for nuclear power. Davis finds that this is particularly true in countries like the United States where recent technological advances have dramatically increased the availability of natural gas.

Using two large datasets, the National Survey of Families and Households and the public use files of the U.S. Census, Janice Compton and Robert Pollak find that the predicted probability of employment and labor force participation is between 4 and 10 percentage points higher for married women with young children living in close proximity to their mothers or their mothers-in-law than for those living further away. The researchers interpret family-member availability to include not only regular scheduled childcare during work hours but also whether the mother or mother-in-law can provide irregular or unanticipated childcare as needed in emergencies or other special circumstances.