quick job entry or long term human capital development the dynamic effects of alternative training schemes this study evaluates and compares the eectiveness of two alternative training schemes for the unemployed short job search oriented training and long human capital oriented training we investigate the impact dynamics of these pro grams considering both unemployment and employment duration our analysis uses a rich administrative longitudinal data set for germany where both programs were implemented at the same time our estimation strategy flexibly accounts for dy namic selection on observables and unobservables as well as heterogeneous treatment eects the results indicate that short term training schemes can be an eective tool to reduce unemployment in the long run in particular if participation occurs early during unemployment long term training schemes increase the average du ration of employment spells more strongly than short term training however they increase the expected unemployment duration if they are started early during un employment this negative short run impact of long term training is an important driver of its overall eectiveness

effects of welfare reform on illicit drug use of adult women exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time and comparing relevant population subgroups within an econometric difference in differences framework we estimate the effects of welfare reform on adult women s illicit drug use from 1992 to 2002 the period during which welfare reform unfolded in the u s the analyses are based on all available and appropriate national datasets each offering unique strengths and measuring a different drug related outcome we investigate self reported illicit drug use from the national household surveys on drug abuse and national surveys on drug use and health drug related prison admissions from the national corrections reporting program drug related arrests from federal bureau of investigation uniform crime reports and drug related emergency department episodes from the drug abuse warning network we find robust evidence that welfare reform led to a 10 21 decline in illicit drug use among women at risk of relying on welfare as well as associated declines in drug related arrests 6 7 drug related hospital emergency department episodes 7 11 and possibly drug related prison admissions 11 19 the findings indicate that an appropriately designed system with sufficient job opportunities for those are able to work can result in both increases in employment and decreases in drug use

effects of welfare reform on women s voting participation this study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the united states in the 1990s on voting among low income women using the november current population surveys with the added voting and registration supplement for the years 1990 through 2004 and exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time we estimate the causal effects of welfare reform on women s voting registration and voting participation during the period in which welfare reform unfolded during this time period voter turnout was decreasing in the united states we find robust evidence that welfare reform led to smaller declines in voting about 3 to 4 percentage points which translates to about 10 relative to the baseline mean for women who were exposed to welfare reform compared to several different comparison groups of similar women who were much less exposed the robust findings suggest that welfare reform had prosocial effects on civic participation as characterized by voting the effects were largely confined to presidential elections were stronger in democratic than republican states were stronger in states with stronger work incentive policies and appeared to operate through employment education and income jel d72 h53 i38 j21

evaluating welfare reform in the united states this paper reviews the economic literature on welfare reform over the 1990s a brief summary of the policy changes is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques that analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes the paper then critically reviews the econometric and experimental literature on caseload changes labor force changes poverty and income changes and family formation changes a growing body of evidence suggests that recent policy changes have influenced economic behavior and well being one particular set of new style welfare programs seems to show especially promising results with significantly increased work and earnings and reduced poverty

accounting for the decline in afdc caseloads welfare reform or the economy we use state level monthly panel data to assess the relative contributions of the macroeconomy and welfare reform in accounting for the 1993 96 decline in aid to families with dependent children afdc caseloads our results suggest that the decline in per capita afdc caseloads is attributable largely to the economic conditions in states and not to waivers from federal welfare policies nationwide we attribute 66 percent of the decline to the macroeconomy however we do find substantial heterogeneity in the impact and timing of alternative waivers on afdc caseloads states with waivers impacting parental responsibilities experienced greater caseload declines than states with waivers that made work more attractive overall our model predicts that had it not been for the influence of economic factors welfare reform would not have led to any decrease in aggregate caseloads

household labor supply and welfare participation in sweden using a sample of swedish households we estimate a household labor supply model assuming that preferences for consumption and leisure can be described by a direct translog utility function the labor supply and welfare participation decisions are treated as a discrete choice problem and we assume that these choices follow a simple conditional logit rule in addition we allow unobserved individual specific effects to be correlated across alternatives we assume that these unobserved effects are drawn from a discrete distribution and the correlation across alternatives is modeled using factor loading techniques classification error in hours is allowed for by using a multiplicative measurement error specification the estimates from the structural model yield inelastic labor supply among husbands and positive wage elasticity for wives further the cross elasticities are close to zero

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

divided we reform evidence from us welfare policies abstract divided government is often thought of as causing legislative deadlock i investigate the link between divided government and economic reforms using a novel data set on welfare reforms in us states between 1978 and 2010 panel data regressions show that under divided government a us state is around 25 more likely to adopt a welfare reform than under unified government several robustness checks confirm this counter intuitive finding case study evidence suggests an explanation based on policy competition between governor senate and house

what mean impacts miss distributional effects of welfare reform experiments labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings transfers and income yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts we investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random assignment data from connecticut s jobs first waiver which features key elements of post 1996 welfare programs estimated quantile treatment effects exhibit the substantial heterogeneity predicted by labor supply theory thus mean impacts miss a great deal looking separately at samples of dropouts and other women does not improve the performance of mean impacts we conclude that welfare reform s effects are likely both more varied and more extensive than has been recognized

the effects of the macroeconomy and welfare reform on food stamp caseloads since 1994 there has been an unprecedented decline in the number of people receiving food stamp benefits from a record high of 27 5 million in 1994 the number of food stamp recipients fell over 30 to 18 0 million by mid 1999 during this period the united states has experienced the third longest economic expansion of the twentieth century this has resulted in a dramatic growth of new jobs and the lowest unemployment rate in a generation simultaneously the welfare system has undergone a major transformation beginning in the early 1990s when many states made changes to their welfare programs through federal waivers from aid to families with dependent children afdc requirements the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 prwora furthered these changes by replacing afdc where states contributions were matched by the federal government with a block grant program called temporary assistance for needy families tanf prwora introduced new rules on tanf recipients such as terminal time limits work requirements and personal responsibility measures it also directly changed the food stamp program by ending the eligibility of some recipients and reducing average benefit levels at the same time innovative changes in the delivery of food stamp benefits have been taking place with the introduction of electronic benefit trans

can targeted transfers improve birth outcomes evidence from the introduction of the wic program abstract the goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the united states is to improve the nutritional well being and health of low income families a large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the supplemental program for women infants and children wic has accomplished this goal but most studies have been based on research designs that compare program participants to non participants if selection into these programs is non random then such comparisons will lead to biased estimates of the program s true effects in this study we use the rollout of the wic program across counties to estimate the impact of the program on infant health we find that the implementation of wic led to an increase in average birth weight and a decrease in the fraction of births that are classified as low birth weight we find no evidence that these estimates are driven by changes in fertility or selection into live births our preferred estimates suggest that wic initiation raised average birth weight by 2 g or by 7 g among infants born to mothers with low education levels these translate into estimated birth weight increases among participating mothers of approximately 18 to 29 g estimated treatments on the treated impacts among infants born to participating mothers with low education are of similar magnitude

discretionary policy and multiple equilibria in lq re models we study discretionary equilibria in dynamic linear quadratic rational expectations models in contrast to the assumptions that pervade this literature we show that these models do have multiple equilibria in some situations we demonstrate the existence of multiple discretionary equilibria by example we investigate general properties of discretionary equilibria and discuss implications for numerical algorithms

marijuana on main street estimating demand in markets with limited access abstract marijuana is the most common illicit drug with vocal advocates for legalization among other things legalization would increase access and remove the stigma of illegality our model disentangles the role of access from preferences and shows that selection into access is not random we find that traditional demand estimates are biased resulting in incorrect policy conclusions if marijuana were legalized those under 30 would see modest increases in use of 28 percent while on average use would increase by 48 percent to 19 4 percent tax policies are effective at curbing use where australia could raise au 1 billion and the united states us 12 billion jel d12 h25 k14 k42

welfare dynamics under time limits among the most important changes brought about by the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 are time limits which provide consumers with an incentive to conserve their welfare benefits for future use among forward looking expected utility maximizing consumers who face liquidity constraints and earnings uncertainty economic theory predicts that the incentive to conserve should be strongest among families with the youngest children we test this prediction using data from florida s family transition program a randomized welfare reform experiment our estimates generally exhibit the predicted age dependence which suggests that time limits affect welfare use before they become binding our estimates indicate that in the absence of other reforms that increased welfare use ftp s time limit would have reduced welfare receipt by 16 percent

does job search monitoring intensity affect unemployment evidence from northern ireland because unemployment benefit reforms typically package together a number of changes few existing evaluations have been able to isolate the effects of changes in job search monitoring intensity on benefit recipient stocks or flows those few studies that do so draw mixed conclusions this paper provides new estimates of monitoring impacts by exploiting plausibly exogenous periods where search monitoring has been temporarily withdrawn with the regime otherwise unchanged during a series of benefit office refurbishments in northern ireland as we would expect from search theory withdrawal of monitoring significantly increases the stock of unemployment benefit recipients via reduced outflows

non parametric estimates of the labor supply effects of negative income tax programs this article reports nonparametric estimates of the effect of labor supply behavior on the payments to families enrolled in the seattle denver income maintenance experiment the randomized assignment of families to the treatment groups in this experiment was designed to permit the calculation of these nonparametric estimates however the nonparametric estimates have never been reported even though they are easy to construct using a simple weighting procedure unfortunately responses to the data collection instrument which depended on costly surveys were not random and this opens up some ambiguity in the results

the behavioral effects of welfare time limits time limits are among the most fundamental of recent welfare reforms whereas welfare benefits were an entitlement under the old aid to families with dependent children afdc program the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act of 1996 prwora which replaced afdc with the temporary aid to needy families tanf program restricts most families to 60 months of federally funded benefits although the states are free to extend benefits further using their own funds almost all have incorporated some sort of time limit into their tanf programs time limits may affect welfare receipt in two distinct ways the most obvious effect is mechanical reducing welfare use once recipients exhaust their benefits however time limits may also reduce welfare receipt before recipients reach the limit if families are forwardlooking they may reduce their current welfare use in order to preserve their benefits for the future the purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on such anticipatory or behavioral effects of time limits i use data from the survey of income and program participation sipp to replicate my earlier estimates based on the current population survey cps i also exploit the sipp to relax some of the restrictive assumptions that were implicit in my previous work

can variation in subgroups average treatment effects explain treatment effect heterogeneity evidence from a social experiment we assess whether welfare reform affects earnings only through mean impacts that are constant within but vary across subgroups this is important because researchers interested in treatment effect heterogeneity typically focus on estimating mean impacts that only vary across subgroups using a novel approach to simulating treatment group earnings under the constant mean impacts within subgroup model we find this model does a poor job of capturing treatment effect heterogeneity for connecticut s jobs first welfare reform experiment notably ignoring within group heterogeneitywould lead one to miss evidence that treatment effects are consistent with basic labor supply theory

jump starting self employment evidence among welfare participants in argentina one important concern of governments in developing countries is how to phase out large safety net programs the authors evaluate the short run effects of one possible exit strategy programs that promote self employment in argentina they provide evidence that a small fraction of beneficiaries were attracted by this program overall potential participants to self employment are more likely to be female household heads and more educated beneficiaries relative to the average jefes beneficiaries using nonexperimental methods the authors show that participation in the program does affect the labor supply of participants by reducing the probability of having an outside job especially for males and increasing the total number of hours worked but the intervention fails to produce on average income gains to participating individuals and households in the short run the fact that a small subset of former welfare beneficiaries are attracted to the program coupled with the fact that only a subset of participants younger and more educated beneficiaries and with previous self employment experience benefited from participation has important implications for this intervention to represent a viable exit strategy from welfare

the effects of time limits the eitc and other policy changes on welfare use work and income among female headed families of all of the welfare reforms that were implemented during the 1990s time limits may represent the single greatest break from past policy this paper expands on what is known about this important welfare reform measure by exploiting the predictions from grogger and michalopoulos 2003 to estimate the effects of time limits on welfare use employment labor supply earnings and income among female headed families results based on data from the march current population survey suggest that time limits have had important effects on welfare use and work accounting for about one eighth of the decline in welfare use and about 7 of the rise in employment since 1993 they have had no significant effect on earnings or income however the analysis also shows that the collective effects of other reforms have had important impacts on employment and labor supply furthermore it identifies the earned income tax credit eitc as a particularly important contributor to both the recent decrease in welfare use and t

electronic filing tax preparers and participation in the earned income tax credit abstract in 2002 more than 18 million low income individual taxpayers received the earned income tax credit eitc despite its size non participation in this program is a concern and substantial effort is devoted by the irs local governments and many non profits to address it using variation across states in the introduction of state electronic filing programs we show that the introduction of electronic filing had a significant effect on participation in the eitc our results are robust to accounting for other welfare eitc and irs reforms introduced during the same period we speculate that the impact of this policy change on the tax preparation industry played an important role in increasing participation

transitions from welfare and the employment prospects of low skill workers this study examines the effects that labor market conditions and welfare policy changes had on single mothers welfare participation and economic outcomes using longitudinal individual level data from the 1992 and 1993 panels of the survey of income and program participation sipp the study uses special versions of the sipp panels that include state and county identifiers and links the individual information to county specific measures of low skill employment opportunities and state measures of welfare policies it estimates transition models of program entry and exit and regression models of economic outcomes the study finds that employment conditions and welfare benefit levels were significant determinants of single mothers welfare participation and economic success over the period 1992 95 however it does not find statistically distinguishable differences in participation and economic success between states that did and did not reform their welfare programs through waivers to the federal rules jel classification i3 j3

child support enforcement and welfare caseloads although there is a large body of research devoted to the issue of the determinants of welfare caseloads none of these studies has incorporated the effects of child support enforcement cse we employ annual state panel data from 1980 to 1999 and find that states with more effective cse have significantly lower welfare caseloads the improvement in cse over this period reduces welfare caseloads by about 9 percent in 1999 we also discover that individual child support variables may not be good indicators of state cse vigor and that a cse index that includes multiple dimensions of cse is more likely to capture the multiplicative functions of cse

targeting transfers through restrictions on recipients our objective is to design transfer programs that maximize some social welfare function following the optimal income tax formulation we assume that a random process endows individuals with characteristics that influence welfare such as ability to earn income medical condition or unmonitorable income the goal is to maximize the utility of a randomly chosen individual other individualistic social welfare functions would lead to equivalent results if the random characteristics were observable a first best outcome could be achieved by making them the basis for lump sum transfers in practice however we can observe only indicators of these characteristics such as earnings medical expenditures or consumption patterns the challenge for policy is to design an efficient second best transfer program based on indicators in this paper we argue that 1 an optimal transfer program in general must sacrifice productive efficiency to target efficiency this is done by imposing restrictions on the choices made by intended beneficiaries 2 a program that incorporates restrictions such as means tested in kind transfers commodity specific taxes and subsidies and even ordeals i e the imposition of deadweight costs to qualify for a transfer will perform better than programs that rely solely on income taxes and cash transfers

policy watch the 1996 welfare reform welfare reform legislation was passed in the summer of 1996 four key research questions that the new law presents to social scientists are as follows 1 can states design and operate better programs than afdc this includes questions about the ability of afdc women to work a significant number of hours the legislation s effect in areas of concentrated urban poverty and the extent to which women will be able to improve their families economic status under the legislation 2 will jobs be available 3 how will the new block grant affect states fiscal situation and 4 what new research methodology questions does this legislation introduce

poverty among minorities in the united states explaining the racial poverty gap for blacks and latinos the two largest minorities in the united states african americans and people of hispanic origin show official poverty rates at least twice as high as those of non hispanic whites these similarly high poverty rates between the two minorities are however the result of different combinations of factors related to the specific characteristics of these two groups in this article we analyse the role of demographic and labour related variables in the current differential of poverty rates among racial and ethnic groups in the united states and its recent evolution our results show first that these differentials are largely explained by differing family characteristics of the ethnic groups furthermore we show that while labour market activity of family members and a preponderance of single mothers play a more significant role in the higher poverty rates of blacks a larger number of dependent children is closely associated with higher poverty among latinos who also suffer from a larger educational att

the effects of in work benefit reform in britain on couples theory and evidence this paper examines the effects of the working families tax credit wftc on couples in britain we develop a simple model of household decisions which explicitly accounts for the role played by the tax and benefit system its main implications are then tested using panel data from the british household panel survey collected between 1991 and 2002 overall the financial incentives of the reform had negligible effects on a wide range of married mothers decisions such as eligible working at least 16 hours per week and full time employment working at least 30 hours per week employment transitions childcare use and divorce rates women s responses however were highly heterogeneous depending on their partners labour supply and earnings mothers married to low income men showed larger responses in employment especially if they had younger children they were more likely to remain in the labour force and had higher rates at which they entered it while more likely to receive the tax credit they also experienced a greater risk of divorce we find virtually no effect for women with higher income husbands likewise there are no statistically significant responses among married men

the impact of welfare on young mothers subsequent childbearing decisions the impact of welfare on fertility in the united states is explored focusing on the theory that some women have many children to increase their incomes and to prolong their stay on welfare rolls the author examines the relationship between welfare and births to women who already have a child using data on young mothers from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy i find that variations in welfare benefit levels and the incremental benefit have no statistically significant impacts on the subsequent childbearing decisions of young mothers in general nor on the subsequent childbearing decisions of women who received welfare in particular furthermore mothers who received welfare to support their first children are no more likely to have additional children in any given year through the age of 23 excerpt

what causes public assistance caseloads to grow this paper uses state panel data to investigate changes in public assistance caseloads through the end of the afdc program in 1996 with particular attention to the rapid increase in caseloads between 1990 and 1994 previous research has focused on total caseloads with attention to economic and policy variables and does a relatively poor job of explaining this caseload increase this paper utilizes a much richer set of control variables to investigate the causes of caseload change it separates afdc caseloads into three subcomponent programs separately investigating changes within the afdc up program afdc child only cases and the remaining core afdc cases with benefits paid to single mothers and their children and it explores whether this caseload rise was driven by changes in takeup rates versus in eligibility the results indicate a large unexplained rise in total afdc caseloads even with a very rich specification a good share of this is due to sharp increases in child only cases driven by program and demographic shifts to a lesser extent this rise was caused by the expansion of afdc up to all states these two factors explain half of the overall rise and all of the unexplained rise in afdc caseloads the remaining increase in core afdc cases benefits received by single mothers and their children is well explained within the model and is the result of economic demographic political and policy changes these variables appear to have increased eligibility among the core afdc population in the early 1990s during the economic slowdown takeup rates also increased during this time period but not by a large amount

changes in the distribution of children s family income over the 1990 s while the 1990 s were a good decade for many u s families there has been an ongoing debate about how children particularly poor children have been faring child poverty rates did not fall substantially in the economic expansion of the 1980 s and rose to the very high rate of 23 percent in 1993 furthermore substantial changes in public assistance programs were implemented over this decade major legislative reform in 1996 increased work mandates on welfare recipient families and gave states much greater discretion to enforce these mandates and actually terminate assistance these changes could make at least some poor families worse off if they lost public assistance and were unable to find steady employment we propose to investigate changes in the entire distribution of children s family income over the 1990 s which allows us to observe the relative changes in income experienced among children in higherand lower income families we are particularly interested in two questions i how has the economic status of children changed at different points in the income distribution ii is there any evidence that welfare reform contributed to the observed changes some evidence on changes in child wellbeing over the 1990 s suggests good news child poverty rates fell to 16 percent by 2001 and poverty rates among black children hit a historical low of 30 percent in that year blank 2002 and jeffrey grogger et al 2002 provide a complete set of citations to the growing literature that looks at changes in income and consumption over the past decade at least some of this research indicates that not all low income families experienced economic gains in this paper we use data on children s household income from the march current population survey cps and average together information from 1992 1995 and 1997 2000 by averaging four years of data we have an adequate number of observations to observe income reliably at each centile 1 100 in the distribution we focus on these comparison years because they both bracket the economic expansion of the 1990 s and they bracket the 1996 legislative changes in welfare programs to account for differences in family size across families our focus is on the income to needs ratio defined as the income level of the child s family divided by the official poverty line for that family rather than on actual income levels we compare data from two samples one that includes all children and another that includes only children in families without both parents present this latter sample is largely composed of children in single parent families but also includes children who live with neither parent about 3 percent of all children in the mid 1990 s

distinguished lecture on economics in government fighting poverty lessons from recent u s history in his 1964 state of the union address his first after assuming the presidency president lyndon johnson declared a war this administration today here and now declares unconditional war on poverty in america the result of johnson s declaration was a series of major legislative changes whose success or failure is still hotly debated by the mid 1990s the focus of policy concern had shifted from fighting poverty to reducing welfare dependence however one might argue that the 1990s rather than the 1960s were truly the decade in which the united states fought a war on poverty the 1990s were a time of substantial legislative change in programs designed to assist low income families at the same time a remarkable change also occurred in the behavior of low income families with plummeting use of public assistance and substantial increases in labor market involvement i will start by documenting the magnitude and speed of these behavioral changes during the 1990s and then investigate the role of both the macroeconomy and policy in producing these outcomes i end by discussing how these changes may or may not translate into improvements in long term family well being

taxes and time allocation evidence from single women and men the classic model of becker 1965 suggests that labor supply decisions should be analyzed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work this paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns using the panel study of income dynamics from 1975 to 2004 we analyze the response of single women s housework labor supply and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels number of children states and time we find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases market work increases and housework decreases with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two thirds of the increase in market work analysis of repeated cross sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that home production decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes data on expenditures from the consumer expenditure survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force the baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2 61 the results are consistent with the becker model meanwhile single men show little response to changes in tax policy and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1 52

welfare rules incentives and family structure we reexamine the effects of welfare on family structure emphasizing that afdc and tanf rules are based more on the biological relationship of the mother s children to any male in the household than on marriage or cohabitation we find that many 1990s welfare reform policies did not affect family structure but that several work related reforms increased single parenthood and decreased marriage to biological fathers these effects are most evident when work related reforms are bundled and examined over a longer time period we hypothesize that these effects stem from increased earnings of single mothers and factors specific to biological fathers

marriage and economic incentives evidence from a welfare experiment can economic incentives be used to affect marriage behavior and slow the growth of single parent families this paper provides new evidence on the effects of welfare benefit levels on the marital decisions of poor women exogenous variation in welfare benefit incentives arises from a randomized experiment carried out in california that allows me to measure responses beyond simple year to year changes in benefit levels i find that a regime of lower benefits and stronger work incentives encourages married aid recipients to stay married but has little effect on the probability that single parent aid recipients marry the effects on married recipients become larger over time suggesting that long run effects may exist

the effect of welfare payments on the marriage and fertility behavior of unwed mothers results from a twins experiment we study the relationship between welfare benefits and the time to first marriage and time to next birth among initially unwed mothers we use twin births to generate random within state variation in benefits effectively controlling for unobservables that may confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior higher base welfare benefits 1 lead unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage and 2 lead unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth the magnitudes of these effects are fairly modest moreover we find no evidence that the marginal benefit paid at the birth of an additional child the focus of the family cap debate affects fertility

pre 1997 trends in welfare and food assistance in a national sample of families both the food stamp program fsp and aid to families with dependent children afdc saw unprecedented caseload growth from the late 1980s until 1994 followed by caseload declines in the following years these rapid caseload declines are attributed to changing macroeconomic conditions and to substantial changes in program design first in the early 1990s state applied for waivers from federal welfare program regulations which allowed them more freedom to experiment with welfare reforms then in 1996 congress redesigned the federal safety net for low income americans through the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act prwora this paper uses data from the panel study of income dynamics psid to investigate participation transitions from year to year during the waiver period from 1989 to 1996 the distinctive feature of the approach here is that it considers all possible transitions at the individual level among three participation states afdc with or without fsp fsp only and neither rather than treating each program separately this investigation provides a baseline for future work using psid data to study the impact of the 1996 welfare reforms

single mothers working at night standard work and child care subsidies a single parent is constantly scrambling for someone to care for her two preschool daughters while she processes paperwork and inmates at a county jail in winston salem n c hers is an unpredictable ever shifting schedule some days she picks up the phone and calls in her sister who s often busy with her own teen ager some nights she persuades a friend with two little ones of her own to let the girls sleep over her predicament is shared by millions of americans who find themselves working long nonstandard or erratic hours and having to hunt for child care to match hays 1995 i introduction working outside the standard weekday hours of 8 a m to 6 p m between monday and friday is an increasingly common practice in the united states for example 34 3 of all female workers in the united states were nonstandard workers in 1995 kalleberg et al 1997 the investigation of nonstandard work is important for a number of reasons first there is evidence suggesting that workers engaged in nonstandard work are more likely to be assigned to routine jobs and to receive less training and fewer promotions than others barker 1993 tilly 1996 consequently these workers tend to earn less and they are less likely to have health insurance and pension benefits than standard workers hipple and stewart 1996 loprest 1999 and 2002 there also exists a positive link between the quality of an initial job and the likelihood of maintaining employment over time cancian and meyer 2000 rangarajan et al 1998 strawn and martinson 2000 second nonstandard work is linked to a number of adverse outcomes for parents and children such as work and family conflicts marital instability health problems for both parents and children and poor educational outcomes for children heymann 2000 presser 2000 staines and pleck 1983 finally the majority of nonstandard workers view employment during nonstandard hours as an accommodation to labor market needs not as a personal preference according to the current population survey more than half of the workers with nonstandard schedules report the nature of their jobs as the reason for their choice only about 6 of nonstandard workers report working such schedules for better pay and only 4 give better child care as their reason for working nonstandard schedules beers 2000 with the passage of welfare reform in 1996 child care assistance has become a more significant tool for helping welfare recipients move into the workforce and for helping other low income families stay off welfare 1 according to the general accounting office gao the majority of states make welfare recipients and families transitioning from welfare to work eligible for child care assistance or give them priority over other low income families when resources are insufficient to cover all who apply gao 2003 almost a decade after the passage of welfare reform congress now debates legislation to reauthorize welfare reform and child care funding remains a key issue however very little is known about whether child care subsidies have in fact played a role in increasing employment among welfare recipients or in general low income individuals in the post welfare reform period blank 2002 even less is known about the effect of these subsidies on standard nonstandard employment decisions of these individuals since the passage of welfare reform the employment rate of single mothers has risen dramatically jones deweer et al 2003 however leaving welfare does not necessarily mean gaining adequate work and increasing economic serf sufficiency in fact only 8 of welfare leavers have been able to sustain employment over a period of four years martinson 2000 over three quarters 78 of employed low income single mothers are concentrated in typically low wage and low benefit occupations jones deweer et al 2003 these occupations typically demand a greater number of hours outside the standard weekday times of 8 a

a cure for discrimination affirmative action and the case of california s proposition 209 proposition 209 enacted in california in 1996 and made effective the following year ended state affirmative action programs not only in education but also for public employment and government contracting this paper uses cps data and triple difference techniques to take advantage of the natural experiment presented by this change in state law to gauge the labor market impacts of ending affirmative action programs employment among women and minorities dropped sharply a change that was nearly completely explained by a decline in participation rather than by increases in unemployment this decline suggests that either affirmative action programs in california had been inefficient or that they failed to create lasting change in prejudicial attitudes

does the availability of high wage jobs for low skilled men affect welfare expenditures evidence from shocks to the steel and coal industries abstract we study shocks to the coal and steel industries to measure the effect of long term changes in demand for low skilled workers on welfare expenditures the coal and steel industries have historically paid high wages to low skilled men we find a substantial increase in welfare expenditures in response to the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the 1980s and an even more substantial reduction in welfare expenditures during the coal boom of the 1970s additional analysis indicates the reduction in welfare expenditures during the coal boom is due in part to a decline in single parent households

does welfare inhibit success the long term effects of removing low income youth from the disability rolls i estimate the effects of removing low income youth with disabilities from supplemental security income ssi on their earnings and income in adulthood using a regression discontinuity design based on a 1996 policy change in age 18 medical reviews i find that youth who are removed from ssi at age 18 recover one third of the lost ssi cash income in earnings ssi youth who are removed and stay off ssi earn on average 4 400 annually and they lose 76 000 in present discounted observed income over the 16 years following removal relative to those who do not receive a review jel i30 i38 j14 supporters of welfare programs defend them as vital lifelines for those who face barriers to work while critics charge that these programs create perverse incentives to qualify and perpetuate dependency encapsulating this debate is the controversy over the us supplemental security income ssi program a program that provides cash payments and medicaid eligibility to low income children and adults with disabilities and the aged elderly after three decades of rapid expansion ssi is now the largest nonwork based cash welfare program in the united states paying about 50 billion each year to 8 million recipients including 1 3 million children 1 ssi has been singled out by policymakers and the media for potential perverse incentives

on the relationship between inflation persistence and temporal aggregation this paper examines the impact of temporal aggregation on alternative definitions of inflation persistence using the cpi and the core pce deflator of the united states our results show that temporal aggregation from the monthly to the quarterly to the annual frequency induces persistence in the inflation series

when do women use aid to families with dependent children and food stamps the dynamics of eligibility versus participation this paper investigates dynamic patterns in the relationship between eligibility and participation in the aid to families with dependent children afdc and food stamp programs using monthly longitudinal data from the survey of income and program participation the results indicate that there are many relatively short eligibility spells that do not result in program participation and end with increases in income participation is most likely to occur among women with lower current and future earnings opportunities and is affected by locational and policy parameters those who elect to participate in these programs tend to start receiving benefits almost immediately upon becoming eligible a substantial number of women exit these programs before their eligibility ends among at least some of these women it is likely that unreported changes in income are occurring in 1989 if all eligible single parent families had participated in afdc and food stamps benefit payments in these programs would have been 13 5 billion higher

welfare the earned income tax credit and the labor supply of single mothers during 1984 1996 welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers the earned income tax credit was expanded welfare benets were cut welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated medicaid for the working poor was expanded as were training programs and child care during this same time period there were unprecedented increases in the employment and hours of single mothers we show that a large share of the increase in work by single mothers can be attributed to the eitc and other tax changes with smaller shares for welfare benet cuts welfare waivers training programs and child care programs