Welfare Work Incentives

Revisiting the Work Incentives of Welfare Programs

The standard static model of the e¤ect of welfare programs on labor supply is newly estimated with maximum response heterogeneity. Both reduced form and structural models are estimated allowing response heterogeneity whose shape is estimated nonparametrically. Estimated marginal treatment e¤ects representing the e¤ect of program participation on labor supply for the historical AFDC program are ...

When financial work incentives pay for themselves: evidence from a randomized social experiment for welfare recipients

This paper summarizes early findings from a social experiment that provided financial incentives for new welfare recipients to leave welfare and work full time. The financial incentive was essentially a negative income tax with a requirement that people work at least 30 h/week. Early results show that the financial incentive increased full-time employment, earnings, and income, and reduced pove...

Welfare Rules, Incentives, and Family Structure

We provide a new examination of the incentive effects of welfare rules on family structure among low-income women by emphasizing that the eligibility and benefit rules in the AFDC and TANF programs are based more on the biological relationship between the children and any male in the household than on marriage or cohabitation per se. Using data from 1996 through 2008, we analyze the effects of ...

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 ...