Scholars within different disciplines employ a wide range of empirical approaches to understanding how, why and with what consequences government is organized. We first review recent statistical modeling efforts in the areas of education, job-training, welfare reform and drug abuse treatment and...

A growing consensus is emerging that under PRWORA, more disadvantaged welfare recipients are failing to retain jobs and are not earning enough to rise above the poverty level, even when working full-time. In this study, I draw primarily on the experiences of welfare recipients who participated...

Belief in the resource-saving and service-enhancing potential of inter-organizational collaboration has become virtually an article of faith among resource providers, client advocates, and service planners. Yet collaboration in practice encounters myriad difficulties, and successful...

Social investment funds, a widely used tool of development efforts, aim to support and strengthen local capacity for effective implementation of social and economic infrastructure projects through participatory, community-driven approaches. We investigate whether these participatory methods...

Using a variety of data sources, the contributors explore how performance standards and incentives affect the behavior of public managers and agency employees, their approaches to service delivery, and ultimately, the outcomes for participants.

Studies examining the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programs present findings that are mixed and sometimes at odds, in part due to research design, data, and methodological limitations of the studies. We aim to substantially improve on past approaches to estimate program effectiveness by...

Recent welfare reforms are prompting some state and local welfare agencies to use temporary help service firms to help place welfare recipients into jobs. Concerns have arisen that these jobs are more likely to pay low wages, provide fewer benefits, and offer less stability. We explore the...