California's Food Stamp Program: Participation and Cost Challenges for the State

Assesses trends in the CalFresh program and whether recent and proposed changes would affect California's low participation rates or high administrative costs compared with other states. Suggests further steps, including eliminating fingerprinting

Understanding the link between the economy and teenage sexual behavior and fertility outcomes

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00148-007-0172-5We use individual-level data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and state unemployment rates to examine how the economy affects fertility and its proximate determinants for several groups based on gender, age (15–17 and 18–20 groups), and race/ethnicity.We find that, for 15- to 17-year-old females, several behaviors leading to pregnancies and pregnancies themselves are higher when the unemployment rate is higher, which is consistent with the counter-cyclical fertility patterns for this group. For 18- to 20-year-old males, the results suggested counter-cyclical patterns of fertility behaviors/outcomes for whites, but pro-cyclical patterns for blacks.This research was funded by grant R03HD47407 from the National Institute on Child and Health Development

Contracting for Independent Evaluation: Approaches to an Inherent Tension

There has recently been discussion of whether independent contract evaluation is possible. This article acknowledges the inherent tension in contract evaluation and in response suggests a range of constructive approaches to improving the independence of contract evaluation. In particular, a clear separation between the official evaluation report and a contractor's own publication of analysis from the underlying evaluation appears to be a promising approach. In this approach, the funder would retain almost unfettered rights to the official contract report (including the right never to publish but not the right to change the contractor's text while leaving the contractor's authorship) and the contractor would retain clearly defined rights to publish any findings from the evaluation (subject only to the limitations of human subjects and proprietary data and some minimal notice).independence; evaluation; professional ethics

Why Did the Food Stamp Caseload Decline (and Rise)? Effects of Policies and the Economy

The Food Stamp Program (FSP) is intended to help low-income households afford a nutritionally adequate diet. Since 1990, the FSP caseload has varied widely-rising sharply in the early 1990s, dropping sharply in the late 1990s, and then rising again in the early 2000s. Welfare and food stamp policy changes, as well as the changing economic climate, are plausible candidates for explaining the path of the caseload over time. The authors estimate the effect of these three factors on the total caseload and on two of its components: persons in households combining cash assistance with food stamps, and persons in households where some or all are not receiving cash assistance. They find that together welfare reform and the improving economy explain all of the FSP caseload decline during the late 1990s, and that policies aimed at increasing access to the FSP and the weakening economy explain about half of the FSP caseload increase in the early 2000s. Results analyzing the disaggregated caseloads are not as clear-cut, apparently because of measurement issues during the period when Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs were implemented.

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE EARNINGS OF MILITARY RESERVISTS WHEN THEY ARE ACTIVATED? EVIDENCE FROM ADMINISTRATIVE DATA

From 2001 through 2008, the US Department of Defense (DoD) has activated more than 700,000 military reservists. Activation imposes a variety of costs on reservists. Among those costs is potentially a decline in total earnings during the period of activation. In this paper, we use administrative data on military and civilian earnings to estimate how earnings change when reservists are activated and the causal effect of activation. Contrary to press accounts and DoD survey evidence, our estimates indicate that, on average, the earnings of activated reservists increase substantially when they are activated and that earnings losses are not common.Reserves, Civilian earnings,