Social programs have a wide variety of effects and often have the explicit objective of improving the economic status of the people they serve. In order to be useful to policymakers, benefit-cost analysis of social programs should explicitly take account of these two important program features....

Required work and training, a major component of recent “welfare reform” proposals, is intended to increase the self-sufficiency of welfare recipients and thereby produce savings for government treasuries as well as more income for the recipients themselves. This analysis focuses explicitly...

Social programs have a wide variety of effects and often have the explicit objective of improving the economic status of the people they serve. In order to be useful to policymakers, benefit—cost analysis of social programs should explicitly take account of these two important program...