Welfare Reform for Low-wage Worker in New Zealand: Will Working For Families Work?

Welfare reform and child care options for low-income families.

For the changes under welfare reform to positively affect children, the gains that mothers make from employment must lead to improvements in children's daily settings at home, in child care, at school, or in the community. This article focuses on the role child care can play in promoting the development of, and life opportunities for, low-income children. Key observations include: Total federal...

Fragile Families and Welfare Reform

Displacement and Wage Effects of Welfare Reform

U.S. welfare reforms will add one to two million persons to the labor force from 19932005. Because this increase in labor supply is only about one percent of the U.S. labor force, it is unlikely that welfare reform will have sizable effects on overall U.S. wages or unemployment. However, a variety of economic models suggest that welfare reform will significantly reduce the real earnings of some...

Single Mothers Working at Night: Standard Work, Child Care Subsidies, and Implications for Welfare Reform

Single Mothers Working at Night: Standard Work, Child Care Subsidies, and Implications for Welfare Reform Using a data set from the post welfare reform environment (the 1999 National Survey of America’s Families), this paper investigates the impact of child care subsidies on the standard work (i.e., work performed during the traditional work hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. through Monday and Friday)...

A New Idea for Welfare Reform

This article analyzes several proposals to build work incentives into the U.S. welfare system. It concludes that the most cost effective way to do that is to offer a work subsidy to all low-income single parents—in other words, to simply pay them for working in the labor market. This conclusion is based on a model of the labor force participation behavior of low-income single mothers that the a...