As performance-based contracting in social welfare services continues to expand, concerns about potential unintended effects are also growing. We analyze the incentive effects of high-powered, performance-based contracts and their implications for program outcomes using panel data on Dutch cohorts of unemployed and disabled workers that were…

This retrospective reviews the policies that affect the fertility of American women, both policies designed to alter fertility intentionally as well as those that change childbearing unintentionally. Becker's seminal work on the economics of fertility serves as the theoretical foundation for this literature. After describing Becker's economic…

SSDI beneficiaries lose their entire cash benefit if they perform work that is substantial gainful activity (SGA) after using Social Security work incentive programs. The complete loss of benefits might be a work disincentive for beneficiaries. We report results from a pilot project that replaces the complete loss of benefits with a gradual…

New Hope, an employment-based poverty-reduction intervention for adults evaluated in a random-assignment experimental design, had positive impacts on children's achievement and social behavior two and five years after random assignment. The question addressed in this paper was the following: Did the positive effects of New Hope on younger children…

Between 2000 and 2005, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, until recently, the Food Stamp Program) caseload increased by half. As the Great Recession unfolded, the SNAP caseload grew even more rapidly. Further, over the past two decades the composition of the caseload has shifted sharply away from families combining food and cash…

In December of 2009, many within the American community of analysts, policymakers, and program managers are looking expectantly at the possibility of change in the basic measure used to gauge poverty in the United States. A broad consensus has emerged that the current official measure of poverty in the United States is deeply flawed, in the income…

International comparisons of inequality based on measures of disposable income may not be valid if the size and incidence of publicly provided in-kind benefits differ across the countries considered. The benefits that are financed by taxation in one country may need to be purchased out of disposable income in another. We estimate the size and…

The need to improve the U.S. poverty measure has received renewed attention as state and local governments have initiated antipoverty efforts and wish to judge their effect. This paper describes the New York City Center for Economic Opportunity's implementation of the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations for measuring poverty. The…

This article discusses the implication of the implementation of anti-poverty policy in both the United Kingdom and the United States. International studies of child poverty usually find that the United States and United Kingdom are at the bottom of the league table in terms of child poverty. Indeed, the U.S. and U.K do not fare well in…

In most states, child support paid on behalf of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants is used to offset TANF and child support administrative expenditures; this policy primarily benefits taxpayers. In contrast, Wisconsin allowed most custodial parents to keep all support paid on their behalf. This policy, which treats welfare…

The promotion of marriage and two-parent families became an explicit public policy goal with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Marriage has the putative effect of reducing welfare dependency among single mothers, but only if they marry men with earnings sufficient to lift them and their children out of poverty. Newly released data from…

This paper uses March Current Population Survey data from 1985 to 2004 to explore whether social policy reforms implemented throughout the 1990s have different impacts on employment and welfare use depending on economic conditions, a topic with important policy implications but which has received little attention from researchers. I find evidence…

The interaction of welfare and child support regulations has created a situation in which child support policy's incentives that discourage unwed fatherhood tend to be stronger than its incentives that encourage unwed motherhood. This suggests that more stringent child support enforcement creates incentives that reduce the likelihood of nonmarital…

Differences in administrative (UI) and survey (S) records on employment and earnings have substantial implications for assessing the impact of a variety of public interventions, such as welfare-to-work and employment training programs, and especially the state-oriented welfare reform legislation of 1996. We use data from the 1998 and 1999 waves of…

Some scholars have suggested that a negative consequence of strengthening child support enforcement is to encourage fathers to shift from regular sector to underground employment. We employ data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate the relationship between the strength of child support enforcement (CSE) and levels of…