We provide descriptive evidence from Miami-Dade County (MDC), FL and from five representative areas in Massachusetts (MA) that government policies governing welfare reform, the child-care subsidy system and minimum-standards regulation have had considerable impact on the availability, price, and...

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program was created in 1996 from what was previously named the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The TANF program is intended to serve low-income families, primarily those with only a single parent present, as did the AFDC...

Of all of the welfare reforms that were implemented during the 1990's, time limits may represent the single greatest break from past policy. This paper expands on what is known about this important welfare reform measure by exploiting the predictions from Grogger and Michalopoulos (1999) to...

This paper uses state panel data to investigate changes in public assistance caseloads. Compared to other research, it uses more extensive data, both across states and over time; it utilizes a particularly rich set of control variables; it investigates the different subcomponents of the AFDC...

Child care and early education subsidies are an important part of government efforts to increase economic independence and improve development of children in low-income families in the United States. This chapter describes the main subsidy programs in the U.S., discusses economic issues that...

We assess the role of child care in the welfare to work transition using an unusually large and comprehensive data base. Our data are for Massachusetts, a state that began welfare reform in 1995 under a federal waiver, for the period July 1996 through August 1997. We find that both the nature of...

Child care subsidies are an important part of federal and state efforts to move welfare recipients into employment. One of the criticisms of the current subsidy system, however, is that it overemphasizes work and does little to encourage parents to purchase high-quality child care. Consequently,...

This paper examines the impact of actual subsidy receipt of single mothers on their joint employment and child care mode decisions in the post-welfare reform environment, which places a high priority on parental choice with the quality and type of care chosen. Results indicate that single...

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)...

This paper provides an analysis of child care subsidies under welfare reform. Previous studies of child care subsidies use data from the pre-welfare-reform period, and their results may not apply to the very different post-reform environment. We use data from the 1999 National Survey of...