This paper focuses on children's progress through middle childhood over a four year period, beginning with a synthetic cohort of children aged 6-7 and following them to ages 10-11. We have been particularly concerned with changes over time, seeking to link changing parental work and family...

Recent welfare reform initiatives aimed at moving recipients off welfare and into the workforce represent the most important change in United States social welfare policy in recent decades. Concerns have been raised that nonmetropolitan heads of single-female families with children, the primary...

Beginning around 1990, disability rates of children, as reported by their parents, began to increase. At the same time, a major expansion of Medicaid eligibility to children outside of the welfare population was taking place. Data from multiple panels of the Survey of Income and Program...

In this report, we examine the eligibility for and participation in the earned income tax credit (EITC) for low-income families in California during the 1990s. The EITC is a federal in-come tax credit available to working poor families, with the amount of credit determined by the number of...

This paper uses in depth interviews with the directors of Departments of Human Service Agencies in 29 counties of Appalachian Ohio, a rural area of persistent poverty, to examine their perspectives on the effects of welfare reform on their agencies and communities. We compare these views from...

Welfare caseloads have dropped dramatically in recent years, prompting many policy makers to declare an end to welfare as we have known it. The recent decline in caseloads has occurred concurrently with two distinct events. First, most states have restructured their welfare programs to place...

Aid to Dependent Children, the precursor of AFDC, was established in 1935 as a way of providing financial assistance to widows so that they would be free to parent their children. The focus at the time was on strengthening and maintaining mother-child relationships in these stressed families....

This paper empirically examines the role of social networks in welfare participation. Social theorists from across the political spectrum have argued that network effects have given rise to a culture of poverty. Empirical work, however, has found it difficult to distinguish the effect of...

We qualify the contribution of various driving forces to state-level movements in unemployment rates and employment growth from 1956 to 1992. Our story of regional fluctuations in the U.S. economy has a large cast of players -- including government contract awards and the basing of military...

Public concern over immigrants' use of welfare culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Welfare Reform Act (WRA)). Welfare reform radically changed the welfare system in the United States. Its impact on low-skilled U.S. citizens is the subject of...