FACTORY WELFARE WORK

Child Welfare Work

Comparing welfare-to-work programs

As welfare-to-work programs proliferate in 50 states, the need to determine which are effective, which not, becomes more urgent, and the task more daunting. The first two articles in this issue of Focus explore two different approaches to the use of existing survey and administrative data to compare the effects of programs in different states, revealing both the possibilities and the limits of ...

Optimal Welfare-to-Work Programs

A Welfare-to-Work (WTW) program is a scheme of government expenditures on “passive” (unemployment compensation, social assistance) and “active” (job search monitoring, training, wage subsidies) labor market policies targeted to the unemployed. This paper studies the optimal WTW program as a recursive contract between a cost-minimizing government and a worker whose human capital depreciates duri...

Planning for Welfare to Work

We are interested in building decision-support software for social welfare case managers. Our model in the form of a factored Markov decision process is so complex that a standard factored MDP solver was unable to solve it efficiently. We discuss factors contributing to the complexity of the model, then present a receding horizon planner that offers a rough policy quickly. Our planner computes ...

Work, Welfare, and Child Maltreatment

This paper examines how child maltreatment is affected by the economic circumstances of parents. “Child maltreatment” encompasses a wide range of behaviors that adversely affect children. It includes neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse or neglect. Using state-level panel data on the numbers of reports and substantiated cases of maltreatment, we examine whether socioe...