Screening and Assessment in TANF/Welfare-to-Work: Ten Important Questions TANF Agencies and Their Partners Should Consider

Changes to the welfare system brought about by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and state and local welfare reform efforts, carry serious implications for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TNF) recipients with disabilities and barriers to employment. Specifically, work participation and time limit requirements are two key provisions of the federal welfare law which provided a new sense of urgency encouraging states to develop strategies to assist clients with their transistions from welfare to work. As a first step in this process, TANF agencies are considering strategies to identify the barriers that are inhibiting or prohibiting this transition. PRWORA offers unprecedented flexibility to develop such strategies and design programs and services to assist with the transition from welfare to work. This paper is merely a first step in considering some of the many challenges associated with identifying unobserved barriers to employment

Estimating Public and Private Expenditures on Occupational Training in the United States

[Excerpt] Retraining and upgrading the skills of incumbent workers and providing training to new labor force entrants, dislocated workers, and unemployed persons can help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the workforce. Funding for occupational training comes from many sources — the federal government, state and local governments, private employers, philanthropic foundations, and individual workers themselves. This report examines occupational training to present a preliminary picture of the total spending on job training in the United States

Predicting low-income fathers' involvement and the effect of state-level public policies on fathers' involvement with their young children

textThis dissertation examines low-income fathers’ involvement with their young children using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) data. Chapter 3 entitled, “He Said, She Said: Comparing Father and Mother Reports of Father Involvement,” compares mother and father reports of fathers’ frequency of involvement in various activities and in measures of emotional involvement. This chapter finds that fathers report spending 17.6 percent more time engaged in 11 activities with their young children than mothers report the father spending. How parental disagreement is measured yields starkly different results given the underlying distribution of these data. Chapter 4 entitled, “Estimating the Impact of Child Support and Welfare Policies on Fathers’ Involvement,” is a longitudinal analysis combining three waves of the FFCW data with annual, state-level policy data on child support enforcement and welfare policies. This chapter examines the impact of policies on fathers’ involvement over time. Fathers’ involvement is operationalized as accessibility, responsibility, and engagement. Using parents that are unmarried at the time of the focal child’s birth, this chapter finds that public policies do influence fathers’ involvement after controlling for individual social and demographic characteristics. Policies may be operating in conflicting ways to both increase and decrease fathers’ involvement. For example, fathers’ daily engagement is positively affected by stronger paternity establishment policies but is negatively affected by stronger child support enforcement collection rates and the welfare family cap policy. Chapter 5 entitled, “Two Dads Are Better Than One: Biological and Social Father Involvement,” examines whether biological and social fathers are substitutes or complements in a child’s life and how biological fathers and social fathers impact the mother’s frequency of involvement. This chapter finds that resident social fathers contribute as much time to the focal child as resident biological fathers. Factors that increase the overall parental frequency of involvement include having: a resident biological or social father, native-born parents, a biological father who had a very involved father, and a positive relationship between the biological parents. Factors that decrease overall parental frequency of involvement include: the father’s new partner, the father’s incarceration, a mother’s other children, and the child’s increasing age.Public Polic

Examining the Relationship between the EITC and Food Stamp Program Participation Among Households with Children

The federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Food Stamp Program (FSP) are the largest means-tested transfer programs for low-income working parents in the United States. Together, these two programs cost nearly $50 billion per year and comprise the bulk of the social safety net for working poor families. This paper examines how these two programs interact, particularly the potential impact of the EITC on participation in the FSP during the latter half of the 1990s. This paper is the first to focus on examining the relationship between the EITC and FSP participation. Although EITC payments do not reduce the potential size of a household's food stamp allotment under FSP rules, EITC adds to a household's resources and thus could affect its willingness to participate in the FSP. The paper tests this hypothesis with monthly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for 1996 through 1999. We use two logit models to examine the relationship between EITC and FSP participation. Our dependent variable is FSP participation which equals one if a household head participates in the FSP during a given month and zero otherwise. Our primary independent variable of interest in model 1 is actual federal EITC claimed by the household head. In our second model, we replace actual EITC benefits claimed with a computed variable measuring the EITC benefits a household should be eligible for given their household size and earned income. The reduced form of model 1 excludes variables that may be endogenous (e.g., employment status, spousal employment status, TANF participation, and actual TANF benefits received). Specifically, we are concerned about the endogeneity of a household head's employment status, for example, which may simultaneously affect the likelihood of participating in the FSP and be affected by EITC. The full form of model 1 includes these potentially endogenous variables. Model 2 is useful since actual EITC benefits may not be completely exogenous. We tested this by regressing actual EITC benefits on the computed EITC benefits (plus our other control variables) and then including the residuals from this regression in an ordinary least squares regression of food stamp participation on actual EITC benefits and our controls. While our results did not conclusively demonstrate that there was an endogeneity problem with using actual EITC benefits, they did suggest it was possible. Model 2 is also important since there is a large amount of missing data in the SIPP on actual EITC claimed. Since the vast majority of EITC recipients receive the benefit in a lump sum payment between January and April, we might expect that the decision to participate in the FSP would be affected by the seasonal nature of EITC benefits. To determine if the timing of the receipt of EITC benefits impacts food stamp receipt, we also investigate whether federal EITC receipt has a seasonal effect. We do this by running an alternate version of the full form models 1 and 2 using trimester variables (i.e., January-April, May-August, and September-December) interacted with the EITC variable. The results of the reduced and full forms of logit model 1 indicate that federal EITC claimed is positively and significantly related to FSP participation. For the full form model, the coefficient for the low ($1-$999) amount of actual EITC claimed is significantly different from the coefficients on the medium ($1,000-$1,999) and high ($2,000+) amounts at the ten percent level. For the reduced form model, we find that the coefficient for the low ($1-$999) amount of actual EITC claimed is significantly different from the high coefficient, however, the low and medium and high and medium coefficients are not significantly different from one another. We find no significant difference between the coefficients of the actual EITC variable interacted with the calendar trimester. That is, we find no evidence of a seasonal effect of actual EITC on FSP participation. Thus, the coefficients on the federal EITC variables suggest that households that claim EITC are more likely to participate in food stamps, though there does not appear to be a strong relationship between the amount of EITC claimed and FSP participation. Because there is much missing data for EITC claimed in the SIPP, we are skeptical of these results. Our model 2 estimates based on computed EITC benefits show a negative and statistically significant effect of EITC on FSP participation. However, the magnitude of the EITC effect declines as the amount of computed federal EITC benefits increases. The results of the full form model indicate that the effect of computed federal EITC is negative and significant for medium ($1,000-$1,999) and low ($1-$999) amounts of EITC and negative but not significant for high amounts of EITC ($2,000+). Model 2 also provides no evidence of a seasonal effect of computed EITC on FSP participation. Model 2 provides some evidence that the added money households receive from EITC allows them to avoid taking up food stamps. That said, the fact that high levels of computed EITC benefits does not exert a statistically significant effect weakens the hypothesis that money received from EITC may result in households not participating in the FSP. There is no straightforward explanation as to why only low and medium EITC levels reduce FSP participation. We conclude that it is possible that the EITC resulted in some decline in FSP participation rates, however, further study and improved data measuring EITC participation are necessary to sort out the degree to which EITC participation affects participation in the FSP.EITC, income supports, working poor, Food Stamp Program

Connecting People and Place Prosperity: Workforce Development and Urban Planning in Scholarship and Practice

In recent years, the field of workforce development has emerged as a distinct area of policy and practice. While planning scholars have begun to engage with the workforce development field, its relevance and points of connection to planning scholarship remain underexplored. This article attempts to define the workforce development field by articulating its core concerns as well as its domains of practice and scholarship outside the planning field. The article locates workforce development within three stands of planning scholarship, concluding that workforce development represents an important bridge for planners between “place” and “people” prosperity within communities