Evaluating welfare reform in the United States (original) (raw)
Related papers
2000
This paper evaluates the effectiveness of recent welfare reforms, investigating the effects of both state-specific waivers in the early 1990s and the 1996 federal reform legislation. Unlike earlier work, we analyze a wide array of indicators, including welfare participation, labor market involvement, earnings, income and poverty, and family formation. While no single methodology is entirely satisfying, the results in this paper are convincing in part because they are consistent across alternative approaches. We find strong evidence that these policy changes reduced public assistance participation and increased family earnings. The result was a rise in total family income and a decline in poverty. The gains from the 1996 reforms were not as broadly distributed across the distribution of less-skilled women as were the effects of waivers. Waivers also increased labor market involvement among the less-skilled, but the 1996 reforms had little additional impact on work behavior after controlling for economic forces. These policies also appeared to have an impact on family structure.
Journal of Business & …, 2011
Welfare reform has been the recurrent subject of heated debate in the United States, culminating in far-reaching legislation in 1996. Taking the measure of that legislation requires attention both to the broader context of which welfare policy is a part and to the merits of the 1996 law itself. Ultimately, the success or failure of welfare reform, which evoked a great deal of partisan rhetoric, will be assessed on empirical rather than partisan grounds. It cannot be determined merely by changes in the size of welfare caseloads. It is crucial to any piece of legislation to analyze the cost in relations to its benefits. Most importantly, we must ask: What has happened to the families and children who have left the welfare system? Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 is a successful legislation that needs a little troubleshooting, so it will not be the failed anti-poverty prescription A billion dollars every week for Iraq, 87billionforIraq.Wecan′tget87 billion for Iraq. We can't get 87billionforIraq.Wecan′tget5 billion for childcare over five years in welfare reform. -Jim Wallis
Children and Youth Services Review, 2007
This analysis summarizes trends in family economic well-being from five non-experimental, longitudinal welfare-to-work studies launched following the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA). The studies include a sizable group of parents and other caregivers who received TANF at the point of sample selection or shortly thereafter, and share a wide range of similar measures of economic well-being. This analysis provides descriptive information on how these families are faring over time. Our results confirm what has been found by previous studies. Many families remain dependent on public benefits, and are either poor or near-poor, despite gains in some indicators of economic well-being. We caution that these aggregate statistics may mask important heterogeneity among families.
Welfare Reform: How Do We Measure Success?
Annual Review of Sociology, 2002
▪ This paper evaluates a burgeoning literature on the effects of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Our goal is to shift the debate from the current preoccupation with declining caseloads to one focused on the social and economic well-being of fragile families, single mothers, and children. The welfare reform literature reveals many positive changes: reduced poverty rates, lower out-of-wedlock childbearing, greater family stability, and little indication of more spouse abuse or child neglect. But it is too early to claim success and many questions remain unanswered. Poverty remains high among single mothers and their children; welfare recipients experience serious barriers to stable employment; and poor women and children face an uncertain economic and social future as welfare eligibility is exhausted and the economy wanes. With the welfare debate shifting to family and child well-being, sociology has an important policy role to play as the next phase of welfare reform begins after the...
Disaggregating the Impacts of Welfare Reform: Reflections on Five Studies
2004
The five papers in this symposium advance the vital task of disaggregating the impacts of welfare reform. Four report differences across groups defined by location (rural or urban), types of TANF-eligible family, type of family structure, and race and ethnicity. The fifth reports few differences across race and ethnic groups. As our experience with TANF-style welfare grows and opportunities arise to reshape it, policy makers need to understand whether its impacts differ among subgroups, and why any differences exist. These studies provide useful points of departure for future research on these important policy issues.
Welfare Reform and the Labor Market
Annual Review of Economics
This article reviews the basic theoretical models that are appropriate for analyzing different types of welfare reforms, as well as the related empirical literature. We first present the canonical labor supply model of a classical welfare program and then extend this basic framework to include in-kind transfers, incomplete take-up, human capital, preference persistence, and borrowing and saving. The empirical literature on these models is presented. The negative income tax, earnings subsidies, US welfare reforms with features that differ from those in other countries, and childcare reforms are then surveyed in terms of both the theoretical models and the empirical literature surrounding each.
Welfare reform's impact on the welfare caseload, work, marriage, poverty, abortion, and fertility
The purpose of this study is to evaluate how the welfare reforms that were adopted by the States have influenced changes in the welfare caseload, labor supply, marriage, poverty, abortions, and nonmarital births given labor market conditions, political climate, and state-level demographics. To do this appropriately requires one to conduct a detailed examination of state law to carefully define, properly time, and code TANF and other anti-poverty policies that have been adopted by the States since the enactment of PRWORA. I will then combine these policy parameters with monthly state-level TANF caseloads, poverty measures, marriage and fertility rates, economic variables, political parameters, and demographics. Using these data I will estimate a simultaneous-equation model to determine how reform has influenced caseloads, work, marriage, poverty, abortions, and fertility.
Children and Youth Services Review, 2007
How are children and families faring a decade after welfare reform? Evidence from five non-experimental panel studies The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA; P.L. 104-193) of 1996 formalized a shift in the nature of welfare policy in the United States. Although PRWORA instituted broad changes across multiple programs and policy arenas, including Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Food Stamps, child support, child protection, child care, and child nutrition programs, perhaps the most significant (and certainly the most debated and studied) changes dealt with the provision of cash welfare. The replacement of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) ended the entitlement to cash welfare for poor families in the United States that was first created by the Social Security Act of 1935. In addition to providing states with some latitude in the design of their TANF programs, PRWORA also conditioned federal match dollars for cash assistance on work requirements and time limits. At the time of PRWORA's passage, critics argued that these changes would lead to widespread increases in poverty and material hardship, as well as decreases in child and family well-being among low-income single-mother families (Jencks, Winship, & Swingle, 2006). More than a decade after the passage of this landmark legislation, welfare caseloads have decreased and employment rates for single mothers have risen (Blank, 2002; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means, 2004). It appears that PRWORA has not brought about substantial changes in child and family poverty, hardship, or well-being. Evidence linking welfare reform to children's outcomes is mixed, with effects varying by child age and developmental domain (Chase