The nine papers in this volume ask the authors to 'use their analyses to predict what is likely to happen to welfare caseloads, to recipient well-being, and to state budgets and policies when the next recession arrives.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 represents a dramatic change in the US welfare state. One of its key goals was to move lone mothers, even those with young children, from welfare to work. Early evidence suggests that, in concert with a strong...

In 1998, a conference brought together US psychologists, economists, sociologists, demographers, political scientists, social workers, and medical doctors, to review what we know about the processes that affect child development and how we might wisely increase public and private investments in...

This paper provides distribution-free inferences for testing marginal rank dominance and Lorenz, and generalized Lorenz dominances. Marginal dominances refer to ordinary dominance relationships holding between an income distribution and its dependent ...

This paper examines the relationship between income and the extent of material hardship and explores other factors that might affect hardship. Using panel data from the Women's Employment Study, we examine the incidence of material hardship from 1997 to 2003 among current and former welfare...

This paper utilizes a rich longitudinal data set-the Women's Employment Study (WES)-to investigate whether obesity, which is common among women of low socioeconomic status, is a barrier to employment and earnings for current and former welfare recipients. We find that former welfare recipients...

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act requires welfare recipients to look for work and has made it more difficult for nonworking recipients to remain on the welfare rolls. In addition, the economic boom of the 1990s and changes in federal and state policies...