Human Welfare Work in Chicago

Child Welfare Work

Have Welfare-to-Work Programs Improved Over Time In Putting Welfare Recipients To Work?

Data from 76 experimental welfare-to-work programs conducted in the United States between 1983 and 1998 are used to investigate whether the impacts of such programs on employment had been improving over time and whether specific program features influencing such changes can be identified. Over the period, an increasing percentage of control group members received services similar to those offer...

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...

Reconciling Work and Welfare in Europe

The concept of Flexicurity has been receiving much attention as the European social model. One of the most important concepts within the flexicurity approach is employment security, the security of having secure and continuous employment career, which may entail changing employers and jobs. How do European individuals subjectively perceive their employment security? In addition, which individua...