A large body of empirical research has concluded that, at least during the 1950s and 1960s, the effect of welfare benefits on migration differed significantly by racial group, with blacks being attracted by and whites repulsed by areas that provided high welfare benefits. This study revisits the issue of racial differences in attractiveness to interregional differences in welfare benefits, usin...

Recently the Social Security Administration was given responsibility for the administration of the aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) program. The major source of national data describing AFDC recipients is a series of studies of the families that receive payments under the program. Eleven such studies have been conducted on an intermittent basis since the program began in 1936. The...

In this chapter, we describe several aspects of the labor market performance of a sample of fathers of children whose mothers participate in Wisconsin Works (W-2). We track labor market outcomes for these fathers during calendar years 1998 and 1999, after the AFDC program was replaced by the W-2 program. Welfare reform in this period had direct and dramatic consequences for resident parents on ...

Because person-level data are not currently available at the Federal level, many questions regarding the use and expenditures of Medicaid services remain unanswered. This article demonstrates the capability of State Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) to provide data that can address a variety of Medicaid program issues at both the State and Federal levels. Using data from the Tennes...

Unilateral deafness has a high incidence in children. In addition to children who are born without hearing in one ear, children with bilateral deafness are frequently equipped only with one cochlear implant, leaving the other ear deaf. The present study investigates the effects of such single-sided deafness during development in the congenitally deaf cat. The investigated animals were either bo...

Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pool...

What is the effect of the AFDC-Unemployed Parent (UP) program on two-parent families? This question has become particularly relevant following the passage of the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988, effective October 1990, which extended the previously state-optional AFDC-Unemployed Parent program to all states. This study clarifies what is meant by "two-parent" family in the federal legislation a...

We document a negative association between nonmarital childbearing and the subsequent likelihood of first marriage in the United States, controlling for a variety of potentially confounding influences. Nonmarital childbearing does not appear to be driven by low expectations of future marriage. Rather, it tends to be an unexpected and unwanted event, whose effects on a woman's subsequent likelih...

Workfare, reciprocal obligations, parental responsibility, and the need to balance opportunities with mandates have been prominent in the current lexicon of welfare reform, replacing the emphasis on entitlements and incentives familiar from an earlier era. This article discusses why the debate has shifted toward work strategies and summarizes what we know about the feasibility and success of th...