This paper investigates the link between welfare payments and drug use among injection drug users. The authors find an increase in the likelihood of an overdose in the days following check arrival, and in the probability of leaving the hospital against medical advice (AMA) on check day. Using the check arrival date as an instrument, we estimate…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the feasibility and results of ascertaining Medicare enrollees' priorities for insured medical benefits. Design and Methods: Structured group exercises were conducted with Medicare enrollees from clinical and community settings in central North Carolina. By participating in a decision exercise,…

The article addresses a hypothetical dilemma confronted by an evaluator of a transition from welfare program regarding inclusion of a small immigrant/language minority group in the study. The article advocates for inclusion of diverse groups. Three important aspects of diversity are discussed that have particular relevance to transition from…

The Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project is the most comprehensive effort thus far to ascertain which approaches help welfare recipients and other low-income people stay steadily employed and advance in their jobs. Launched in 1999 and slated to end in 2009, the ERA project encompasses more than a dozen demonstration programs and…

To assess prevalence and odds for teenage parenthood among former child welfare clients, we used national register data for all children born in Sweden 1972-1983 (n = 1,178,207), including 49,582 former child welfare clients with varying intervention experiences. Logistic regression models, adjusted for demographic, socio-economic and familial…

Scully-Russ (2005) described the low-wage labor market issue and the tendency in academic literature to view the problem as "fixing" the skills of low wageworkers. However, the article does not address instructional design issues surrounding low-wage employee training interventions. This manuscript attempts to discover the key factors surrounding…

The research reported in this paper examined the role of welfare reform in increasing the availability of entry-level workers to meet the rising demand for long-term care employees. Findings from national and statewide evaluations of welfare programs show mixed results in the extent to which beneficiaries could be shifted from welfare caseloads to…

We examined the influence of income source within the context of persistent poverty on children's disruptive classroom behavior at age 12 and whether these associations were mediated by maternal supervision at ages 10 and 11. Using a subsample (N = 1,112) from the Quebec Longitudinal Study, we coded four economic circumstances indicating…

The Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP) originated as a new vision of a welfare system that would encourage work, reduce reliance on public assistance, and reduce poverty. The program began in April 1994 in seven Minnesota counties and differed from the existing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) system in two key ways: It…

In 1997, the District of Columbia enacted legislation implementing provisions of the 1996 federal welfare law, which includes a 5-year lifetime limit on welfare benefits. Families will begin reaching that limit in 2002. The District's welfare reform experience has been similar to that of other states. Welfare caseloads have fallen substantially,…

This article examines the employment and child care responses of families participating in 10 experimental welfare reform programs conducted in the United States between 1989 and 2002. For the programs analyzed, child care use increases by about the same amount as the increase in employment. Most of the increased child care comprises informal care…

Rebecca Blank explores a weakness of the welfare reforms of the mid-1990s--the failure of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program to address the plight of so-called "hard to employ" single mothers and their children. TANF has moved many women on the welfare caseload into work, but the services it provides are not intensive or flexible…

Increasingly the poor have been receiving federal assistance through goods and services rather than cash. These goods and services have not been counted when measuring the income and poverty of the recipients. This report examines three proposals to change the manner in which poverty is measured. All include ways to calculate the value of noncash…

Examines the issues surrounding the controversial Workfare program, which establishes work effort as a requirement for receipt of welfare benefits. (SK)

The effect of reforms of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) on caseloads of another program that is Supplemental Security Income (SSI) is examined. The results reveal that a decrease in caseloads in one program cannot be interpreted as an equal-sized decrease in the number of families receiving public assistance.