Welfare Reform, Work and Wages: A Summary of the US Experience

Workfare, Wohlfahrtstheorie, Arbeit, Lohn, Vereinigte Staaten, Welfare economics, Labour, Wages, United States

The Impact of the 1996 SSI Childhood Disability Reforms: Evidence from Matched SIPP-SSA Data

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 changed the definition of disability used to determine eligibility for disabled children under the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and made other changes in the program. The law required the redetermination of eligibility status for children potentially affected by the new definition of disability. As a result, an estimated 100,000 children were expected to lose SSI benefits. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of benefit loss on affected children and their families. The analysis draws on data from the 1992, 1993 and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation matched with Social Security Administration records on SSI program participation. The data are used to analyze the impact of the loss of SSI income as a result of the 1996 legislation on family labor supply, welfare program participation, and income and poverty. Compared with families that lost SSI benefits due to normal attrition from the program, the excess benefit loss due to the 1996 childhood disability reforms is associated with lower levels of family labor supply, higher levels of participation in AFDC/TANF and food stamps, and lower levels of family income relative to poverty. For some outcomes, these effects—measured one month after benefit loss—persist for up to 12 months.

The Use of Early Care and Education by California Families

Examines state data on participation in non-parental care prior to kindergarten by age and type of care setting - center-based, relative, or non-relative care - including subsidized early childhood education by publicly funded program

Preschool and School Readiness: Experiences of Children With Non-English-Speaking Parents

Examines gaps in school readiness among low-income children, especially those in immigrant and linguistically isolated families; the type of early care and education they receive; and the need for targeted center-based preschool programs to close gaps

Representativeness of the Low-Income Population in the Health and Retirement Study with Supplementary Analyses for 1991 and 1997

Working Paper 2014-316We study to what extent the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is representative of all income groups, but with a particular emphasis on low-income groups. To focus on the HRS sample composition and abstract from potential measurement issues associated with measures of income and program participation, we exploit the SSA administrative data matched to the HRS sample and compare their distribution against the distribution of the same variables for the same population in the SSA databases. We find that overall, for cohorts and years that can be most reliably compared, the distributions are very similar and conclude that the HRS is representative for the population it covers. However, for some subgroups in the low-income population (e.g., recipients of Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid beneficiaries), there are some differences and thus we caution against estimating population totals for such small subpopulations. The HRS samples for which restricted matched administrative data are available are often not representative of a broad population of interest, because not all HRS respondents were asked permission to match in any given year. Therefore, the restricted HRS datafiles are generally not suitable for estimating population distributions, although they are still very useful for modeling purposes.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110977/1/wp316.pdfDescription of wp316.pdf : Working pape

Representativeness of the Low-Income Population in the Health and Retirement Study

Working Paper: WP 2013-273We study to what extent the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is representative of all income groups, but with a particular emphasis on low-income groups. To focus on the HRS sample composition and abstract from potential measurement issues associated with measures of income and program participation, we exploit the SSA administrative data matched to the HRS sample and compare their distribution against the distribution of the same variables for the same population in the SSA databases. We find that overall, for cohorts and years that can be most reliably compared, the distributions are very similar and conclude that the HRS is representative for the population it covers. However, for some subgroups in the low-income population (e.g., recipients of Supplemental Security Income, Medicaid beneficiaries), there are some differences and thus we caution against estimating population totals for such small subpopulations. The HRS samples for which restricted matched administrative data are available are often not representative of a broad population of interest, because not all HRS respondents were asked permission to match in any given year. Therefore, the restricted HRS datafiles are generally not suitable for estimating population distributions, although they are still very useful for modeling purposes.Social Security Administrationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99126/1/wp273.pd

A Golden Opportunity: Advancing California's Early Care and Education Workforce Professional Development System

Examines how well the state's professional development system prepares the early care workforce, provides ongoing support to ensure high-quality early childhood education, and effectively uses public resources to maximize benefit