2008
December 2008
David Mundel and Lois Rice discuss the results of a recent experiment about the effect of grant programs on college attendance among lower-income youth.
July 2008
In this paper, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine analyze the impact of state policies that expanded eligibility for Medicaid family planning services to women who do not meet regular Medicaid eligibility criteria. The results of their research show that the expanded eligibility policies had a significant impact on reducing unplanned births.
May 2008
There are a growing number of low-income single mothers who are long-term welfare recipients or are without steady employment. They tend to face more barriers to stable employment, with less education, younger children, higher rates of mental and physical health problems and substance abuse, and a history of domestic violence. In this brief, Rebecca Blank and Brian Kovak propose a new program to link these mothers to medical and economic support and give them greater assistance in securing employment.
2006
April 2006
With so much attention on promoting and sustaining marriage among low-income couples who already have children, policymakers risk forgetting about the need to reduce unwed childbearing in the first place. These initiatives are needed for a number of reasons.
January 2006
Back in the 1970s and the 1980s, there was a high level of concern about the concentration of social ills in poor neighborhoods. At that time, the devastation wrought by the crack epidemic, the rapid rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing, and the high levels of violent crime in the inner cities led a number of journalists and scholars to talk about the emergence of an "underclass." This term was controversial, and over time has fallen out of favor. Nevertheless, the dangerously self-destructive behaviors that gave rise to the underclass debate, and particularly the geographic concentration of these ills in inner cities, were legitimate topics of public concern and led to a burgeoning of research on this group, including attempts to measure its size, composition, and location.
2005
December 2005
In her paper, Margy Waller outlines opportunity costs experienced by transit-dependent poor households, and concludes that when all costs are considered along with benefits of private vehicles, it makes sense to press for more assistance and policies that reduce car ownership costs for poor workers.
December 2005
In this paper, Margy Waller reviews the history of federal block grants for social services, the academic literature examining block grant outcomes, and recent federal proposals.
August 2005
The 1990s were years of considerable change for single mothers and their children. Congress implemented a series of tax and welfare reforms that encouraged work and discouraged welfare. These changes in welfare policy that "ended welfare as we know it" culminated with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, which mandated work requirements and time limits. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) was sharply expanded in 1993, so that it raised after-tax earnings by as much as 40 percent and became the largest anti-poverty program for the non-elderly. Other programs that targeted single-mother families also expanded during this period, such as Medicaid, which nearly tripled 2 Bruce D. Meyer is a professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at The University of Chicago. James X. Sullivan is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. its expenditures. These changes, combined with a strong economy, led welfare caseloads to drop sharply and employment to rise. About half as many families were receiving welfare in 1999 as in 1994. After a long period during which employment for single mothers changed little, the fraction of single mothers who worked increased by more than 12 percentage points by the latter part of the 1990s. How did single-mother families fare in this dynamic environment? The answer to this question is more complicated than one might expect.
March 2005
Wealth inequality in America dwarfs income inequality, with low levels of asset ownership affecting a majority of the country. Thus the bottom 60 percent of the nation collectively possesses less than 5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Broadening the ownership of assets—through IDAs, children’s savings accounts, and targeted tax subsidies for wealth accumulation—may help expand economic security and opportunity for the nation’s poor.
2004
October 2004
In this policy brief, LaDonna Pavetti examines work participation under TANF; the reauthorization proposals on work Congress is considering; the implications of those proposals for state and local welfare offices; and the factors that may have led to lower-than-expected work participation rates and what might be done to raise them.
May 2004
Harry J. Holzer points out that while their employment rates have risen considerably, most former welfare recipients continue to earn very low wages. Similarly, the earnings of less-educated U.S. workers more broadly have also stagnated or fallen in recent years. Using a new dataset from the Census Bureau, some recent research suggests that low earners’ advancement prospects are closely tied to the characteristics of the employers for whom they work.
March 2004
Determining the appropriate balance of power between the national government and the states is the “cardinal question of our constitutional system,” wrote Woodrow Wilson in 1908. The question, he said, would resurface at “every successive stage of our political and economic development.” A current manifestation of the time-honored debate focuses on whether to grant state governments additional discretion in managing and integrating a wide range of federally supported services that, in principle, can help the nation’s poor earn a living rather than depend on public assistance.
2003
September 2003
WR&B Policy Brief by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill (9/2003
July 2003
Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill discuss President Bush's Head Start proposal and argue that, given the vital importance of education to achieving equality of opportunity, the nation must find ways to improve both preschool education and the K through 12 school system.
July 2003
This brief by By Adam Carasso, Jeffrey Rohaly, and C. Eugene Steuerle argues that the time is ripe for an integrated credit that combines the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the CTC into an Earned Income Child Credit (EICC). The proposed EICC simplifies and standardizes the definition of qualifying children and those who may claim them, and indexes the new credit for inflation so that it retains its purchasing power over time. The EICC also provides enhanced benefits to low-income working families and reduces marginal tax rates. One version would cost $6 billion relative to current law (JGTRRA) in calendar year 2003.
May 2003
Although Congress did not reach a compromise last year, Republicans and Democrats and the House and Senate are not that far apart on welfare reform legislation, argues Ron Haskins and Paul Offner
2002
November 2002
The studies reviewed by Harry Holzer suggest that carefully structured work experience programs can have a positive impact on the employment rates of disadvantaged groups and can generate socially valued goods and services. When poorly designed, they can be wasteful and have small net impacts on employment and output.
December 2002
Alice Rivlin describes the state fiscal problem and suggests some solutions. The federal government could provide immediate fiscal relief to the states, and adopt a longer run program to mitigate cyclical swings in the state revenues. States could build more adequate reserves in good times. They could work together to modernize and harmonize their tax systems and share some jointly collected revenues.
April 2002
Several questions about the block grant need to be addressed during the debate on TANF reauthorization, which must be completed by October 1, 2002. These include the size of the block grant and the formula for allocating it among states, whether additional funds should be provided to states during recessions, and whether the TANF performance bonuses should be revised or dropped. R. Kent Weaver outlines several policy options for addressing these issues.
April 2002
Thomas Gais and R. Kent Weaver discuss questions raised by the combination of work-focused policy mandates and increased state discretion.
April 2002
To what extent should welfare-to-work programs emphasize education and training versus immediate job placement? In their paper, Judith M. Gueron and Gayle Hamilton discuss this controversial question. Their findings from rigorous studies show that there is a clear role for skills-building activities. The key lesson is balance.
March 2002
The Food Stamp Program (FSP) is the nation’s nearly universal anti-poverty initiative, providing support to a broad range of low-income households. This paper by Michael Wiseman summarizes FSP operations, program issues, and options for better meeting the program’s objectives.
March 2002
Nancye Campbell, John K. Maniha, and Howard Rolston discuss the need for Congress to continue to support flexibility and funding in its welfare programs if state governments and the research community are to develop accurate information about how to promote retention and advancement.
March 2002
Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins provide an overview of work support programs and examine the pros and cons of proposals to expand them.
March 2002
Rebecca Swartz and Brian Miller examines how the federal government intervenes in housing markets and analyzes the important housing reforms currently under discussion. These include changing the administration of housing vouchers, imposing work requirements and time limits on families receiving housing benefits, converting housing subsidies to a cash benefit, and others.
February 2002
Michael Fix and Ron Haskins discuss one of the more contentious issues in the 1996 welfare reform debate on whether the federal government should provide welfare benefits to non-citizens who are legal residents of the United States.
February 2002
Gina Adams and Monica Rohacek discuss how the 2002 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) presents an opportunity for policymakers to address three important issues: funding levels, who should get subsidies, and the quality of care.
January 2002
While incomes of single mothers as a whole have risen, incomes of women leaving welfare are only slightly above what they were when the women were on welfare. Robert A. Moffitt discusses the need for additional ways of increasing the incomes of such women, and that special policies also need to be directed toward very disadvantaged women, many no longer on welfare, who have major difficulties with employment because of poor job skills, poor physical and mental health, and other problems.
January 2002
Dan Bloom and Don Winstead believe states should continue to have flexibility in setting sanction policies. To reduce inappropriate sanctions, they offer that Congress could expand the types of work activities for disadvantaged recipients, and require states to describe both how they will inform recipients about exemptions from work requirements and what is required to remove a sanction.
2001
December 2001
Alan Weil and John Holahan states that the federal government should retain and expand incentives for states to expand coverage and simplify systems, although this policy will leave considerable interstate variations in place.
December 2001
Because Congress is unlikely to enact a full package of services, Sara McLanahan, Irwin Garfinkel, and Ronald B. Mincy provide and alternate solution. The federal government should consider funding state-run demonstrations to ascertain the benefits and costs of the proposed reforms.
October 2001
Irene Lurie discusses the need for welfare offices to improve their policies and pratices by removing conflicting requirements across programs as well as by improving the training of workers and coordination across human services agencies.
October 2001
Isabel V. Sawhill enumerate steps to be taken that will have the potential to maintain the progress made over the past decade in reducing teen and out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
September 2001
Rebecca M. Blank suggests a variety of legislative changes might be useful to both provide financial support to states in times of rising economic need, and to assure that state welfare-to-work programs continue to function when private sector jobs are not as readily available.
September 2001
In this paper, Greg J. Duncan and Pamela A. Morris summarize results from a synthesis of nearly a dozen welfare experiments to identify which ones are most favorable for children.
August 2001
Paul Offner examines why non-marital births happen, the effort states have made to address the problem, and what additional steps could be taken to reduce non-marital births when Congress reauthorizes welfare reform legislation next year.
July 2001
Ron Haskins and Wendell Primus begin their discussion with a rendition of the facts about poverty on which there is broad agreement. After that, they address a number of policies aimed at reducing child poverty that they expect to dominate the reauthorization debate.
January 2001
In their paper, Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas suggest a tax proposal that builds on one of President Bush’s key ideas - an expanded tax credit for families with children - but modifies it in ways that might prove more acceptable to Democrats.
January 2001
Isabel V. Sawhill, R. Kent Weaver, and Ron Haskins discuss the effects of welfare reform legislation, and a number of issues and problems raised by researchers and advocates, who believe must be addressed in reauthorization.
January 2001
Isabel V. Sawhill, R. Kent Weaver, and Ron Haskins turn their attention to issues and problems that researchers and advocates believe need to be addressed in reauthorization.