The recent reform of the federal welfare system was meant to encourage recipients to leave welfare and enter the workforce. If the reform is successful there are likely to be effects felt throughout the low–skilled end of the labor market. As former welfare recipients enter the labor market, they may exert downward pressure on wages or displace employment of others already in the labor market. ...

1 INTRODUCTION In July1996, American family welfare policy entered a new era, one that espoused a strong ideological commitment to transforming welfare from a program primarily concerned with providing basic economic support to the eligible poor, to one providing only temporary assistance to families while moving large numbers of poor parents into employment. Such a welfare-to-work vision is in...

In one telling, the contemporary welfare reform narrative about poor families with children is straightforward. Passage of the Family Support Act (FSA) by Congress in 1988 challenged states to strengthen policies requiring welfare recipients to work or prepare for work. At the state level, a plethora of waiver-based reform activities subsequently pushed the work agenda much further than FSA req...

Public opinion concerning social welfare is largely driven by perceptions of recipient deservingness. Extant research has argued that this heuristic is learned from a variety of cultural, institutional, and ideological sources. The present article provides evidence supporting a different view: that the deservingness heuristic is rooted in psychological categories that evolved over the course of...

Public interest in promoting the self-sufficiency of families that depend on welfare concerns the ability of fathers, as well as mothers, to support their children through employment. Many welfare recipients are never-married women, and their children seldom receive child support payments. This article estimates the financial resources that go untapped when child support is not collected from t...

National Institutes of Health) to conduct studies and demonstration projects leading to strengthening of family life ; c. urging the Federal Government to encourage States to utilize appropriate available services of voluntary agencies, as well as involving them in studying problems of family disintegration and breakdown and in developing coordinated programs for strengthening of family life; a...

The decreasing availability of cash assistance to single-parent families has resulted in increased policy attention to the private child support system. Child support is being considered as a potential income source for families who would have relied extensively on the welfare system in the past. The 1996 welfare reforms included several provisions designed to increase the importance of child s...

Access to adequate health insurance is a key concern of families with children at all income levels. Since 1965, mothers and children on welfare have had health care coverage through the Medicaid program, which has provided a health care safety net for welfare recipients. Although most Americans are insured through their employers, families who leave welfare for employment often find themselves...

WITH the passage of the welfare reform law of 1996, 60 years of federal welfare policy was abruptly reversed. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) ended the legal entitlement to benefits, mandated that a large percentage of recipients work, and imposed a five-year time limit on the receipt of federally funded benefits. Since then, welfare caseloads have fallen sharply, and...