The 1996 Welfare Reform Act (PRWORA) institutes a maximum sixty-month “life-time” benefit window for TANF block-grant recipients, involving TANF beneficiaries actually finding paid employment somewhere in the extant labor force. We believe that this welfare-to-work transition constitutes the most important element of the welfare reform initiative among states in the U.S. because it reflects the...

Research has shown that several criteria underlie people's opinions about the welfare deservingness of benefit recipients. However, it remains unknown which factors are associated with the emphasis that people place on such criteria. Using a 2006 Dutch national survey on the welfare deservingness of disability pension recipients, we study the influence of structural and cultural factors on peop...

The welfare reform legislation of 1996 transformed many welfare benefits into a temporary safety net available to recipients who made a demonstrated effort to work. The new approach, however, raised concern that the “hard-to-employ” — especially parents with low rates of steady employment, and higher-thanaverage levels of barriers to employment — would be less likely to successfully achieve eco...

This issue brief highlights key facts about the impact of substance abuse on welfare reform and recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF. After outlining some of the data on the incidence of substance abuse as well as its costs and treatment, it concludes by describing innovative state welfare programs attempting to lower barriers to employment and self-sufficiency.

Supporters of recent welfare reforms argue that time limits and other eligibility restrictions serve recipients. We present a simple model of agents with present-biased preferences to investigate the theoretical validity of this claim. We first identify four types of outcome that describe the behavior of a present-biased agent in the absence of time limits. We then show that the behavioral cons...

There is considerable evidence that social position and economic status are related to mental health. This article uses data from the first wave of the HILDA Survey to replicate and extend previous research demonstrating the elevated prevalence of mental disorders among different groups of Australian income support recipients. Welfare recipients were significantly more likely to experience mode...

Medicaid exerts a strong "pull" on potential welfare recipients, increasing the probability that a number of single mothers will apply for and stay on welfare in order to be covered by Medicaid. However, the availability of private health insurance coverage exerts a strong positive influence on women's decisions to work and a strong negative effect on welfare participation rates. If private ins...

1998, employment of never-married mothers rose by an astonishing 40 percent. Moving welfare recipients from welfare to work is the primary goal of current welfare policy. Four years after passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the nation is achieving considerable success in reaching this goal. During the 1990s, the public sector enhanced poor fa...

Household food insufficiency is a significant problem in the United States, and has been associated with poor outcomes on mental health indicators among low-income women. However, it is difficult to disentangle the mental health consequences of household food insufficiency from poverty and other shared risk factors. Drawing on theories of the social production of health and disease, research ev...