What Works Best for Whom? The Effects of Welfare and Work Policies by Race and Ethnicity

Using data from random assignment studies, this paper examines how welfare and work policies similar to those adopted by states since 1996 affected employment, welfare receipt, and income of white, African-American, and Hispanic welfare recipients. The results show little systematic variation in the effects of the programs across racial and ethnic groups. Earnings and welfare benefits were affected the most by programs that stressed employment but allowed people who lacked basic skills to initially enroll in education or training. Only programs that supplemented the earnings of welfare recipients who went to work increased income across the racial and ethnic groups.Earnings; Race; Racial; Welfare

Welfare Dynamics Under Time Limits

Among the most important changes brought about by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is the imposition of time limits. In this paper, we analyze a simple model in which a potential welfare recipient chooses how to allocate her time-limited endowment of benefits so as to maximize her expected lifetime utility. Not surprisingly, the model reveals that time limits provide an incentive for the consumer to conserve, or bank, her benefits. More interesting is the prediction that these incentives to conserve one's benefits vary inversely with the age of the youngest child in one's family. This implies that the reduction in welfare payments that results from PRWORA will fall disproportionately on families with young children. We estimate age group-specific effects of time limits and test the prediction of the model using data from a welfare reform demonstration in Florida. Subject to some assumptions that are necessary to distinguish the effects of time limits from the effects of other provisions of the demonstration, we find that time limits indeed reduce welfare use by the greatest amount among the families with the youngest children. Moreover, time limits have substantial effects on welfare utilization, reducing monthly utilization probabilities by 19 percent. Time limits lead families to exit the welfare rolls well before they exhaust their benefits, suggesting that welfare mothers are rational in the sense of being forward-looking.

Using financial incentives to encourage welfare recipients to become economically self-sufficient

Public welfare ; Poverty ; Employment (Economic theory)

The Limits to Wage Growth: Measuring the Growth Rate of Wages For Recent Welfare Leavers

We study the rate of wage growth among welfare leavers in the Self Sufficiency Program (SSP), an experimental earnings subsidy offered to long-term welfare recipients in Canada. Single parents who started working in response to the SSP incentive are younger, less educated, and have more young children than those who would have been working regardless of the program. They also earn relatively low wages in their first few months of work: typically within $1 of the minimum wage. Despite these differences, their rate of wage growth is similar to other welfare leavers. We estimate that people who were induced to work by SSP experienced real wage growth of about 2.5 - 3 percent per year - a rate consistent with conventional measures of the return to experience for similar workers.

Are Two Carrots Better Than One? The Effects of Adding Employment Services to Financial Incentive Programs for Welfare Recipients

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a social experiment conducted in two provinces in Canada during the 1990s that tested a generous financial incentive program for welfare recipients. A little-known subsidiary experiment, called SSP Plus, had a three-way design that tested the incremental effect of adding employment services to the generous financial incentive program. Employment services are viewed by many welfare analysts as an important component of an overall strategy for helping welfare recipients escape poverty and achieve stable employment. This paper presents the results of the SSP Plus experiment. Adding employment services encouraged more people to take up the earnings supplement, and it appeared to have long-term effects on full-time employment and welfare receipt. This might be because the services improved the jobs people obtained. Both earnings and wage rates were higher compared to earnings and wages without the services and the jobs held appeared to be more sustainable.Labor supply, social program evaluation, welfare policy

A genome-wide analysis of Escherichia coli responses to fosfomycin using TraDIS-Xpress reveals novel roles for phosphonate degradation and phosphate transport systems

BACKGROUND: Fosfomycin is an antibiotic that has seen a revival in use due to its unique mechanism of action and efficacy against isolates resistant to many other antibiotics. In Escherichia coli, fosfomycin often selects for loss-of-function mutations within the genes encoding the sugar importers, GlpT and UhpT. There has, however, not been a genome-wide analysis of the basis for fosfomycin susceptibility reported to date. METHODS: Here we used TraDIS-Xpress, a high-density transposon mutagenesis approach, to assay the role of all genes in E. coli involved in fosfomycin susceptibility. RESULTS: The data confirmed known fosfomycin susceptibility mechanisms and identified new ones. The assay was able to identify domains within proteins of importance and revealed essential genes with roles in fosfomycin susceptibility based on expression changes. Novel mechanisms of fosfomycin susceptibility that were identified included those involved in glucose metabolism and phosphonate catabolism (phnC-M), and the phosphate importer, PstSACB. The impact of these genes on fosfomycin susceptibility was validated by measuring the susceptibility of defined inactivation mutants. CONCLUSIONS: This work reveals a wider set of genes that contribute to fosfomycin susceptibility, including core sugar metabolism genes and two systems involved in phosphate uptake and metabolism previously unrecognized as having a role in fosfomycin susceptibility

Cell Lineages and the Logic of Proliferative Control

It is widely accepted that the growth and regeneration of tissues and organs is tightly controlled. Although experimental studies are beginning to reveal molecular mechanisms underlying such control, there is still very little known about the control strategies themselves. Here, we consider how secreted negative feedback factors (“chalones”) may be used to control the output of multistage cell lineages, as exemplified by the actions of GDF11 and activin in a self-renewing neural tissue, the mammalian olfactory epithelium (OE). We begin by specifying performance objectives—what, precisely, is being controlled, and to what degree—and go on to calculate how well different types of feedback configurations, feedback sensitivities, and tissue architectures achieve control. Ultimately, we show that many features of the OE—the number of feedback loops, the cellular processes targeted by feedback, even the location of progenitor cells within the tissue—fit with expectations for the best possible control. In so doing, we also show that certain distinctions that are commonly drawn among cells and molecules—such as whether a cell is a stem cell or transit-amplifying cell, or whether a molecule is a growth inhibitor or stimulator—may be the consequences of control, and not a reflection of intrinsic differences in cellular or molecular character