Between 2011 and 2016, coal mining employment declined by over 50 percent in Appalachia, resulting in large earnings and employment losses in coal-dependent communities. Whether these disruptions reflect temporary adjustment costs or signal more persistent decline depends in part on the extent and nature of various investment responses. This paper leverages differential Commuting Zone (CZ-) level exposure to coal’s decline to estimate its impact on government transfers and postsecondary training investments.
We investigate how length of time on welfare during childhood affects economic outcomes in early adulthood. Using intergenerationally linked mother-child pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we adopt a nonlinear difference-in-differences framework using the 1990s welfare reform to estimate average and quantile treatment effects on intensity of welfare use and earnings in adulthood.
We examine the responsiveness of the safety net to the Pandemic Recession and compare it to that in the Great Recession. Using monthly state-level administrative caseload data from five large transfer programs–SNAP, TANF, Medicaid, SSI, and UI–and measuring responsiveness by the state-level caseload response to cross-state variation in measures of the business cycle–we find that the safety net response during the Pandemic Recession was greater than occurred during the Great Recession for the most important recessionary-relief programs–UI and SNAP.
In the early 90’s, the United States reformed its welfare system through state waivers and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. These changes altered family resources and potential investments for childhood human capital, which in turn could affect later adult outcomes. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I examine the long-run impact of growing up under welfare reform on adult education and family structure through age 28. I find that as children, these individuals have higher reading test scores by an average of 6% of a standard deviation.
Refundable tax credits and food assistance are the largest transfer programs available to able-bodied working poor and near-poor families in the United States, and simultaneous participation in these programs has more than doubled since the early 2000s.
We estimate the effect of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation and related economic outcomes using a long panel of mother-daughter pairs over the survey period 1968-2013 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Because states implemented welfare reform at different times starting in 1992, the cross-state variation over time permits us to quasi-experimentally separate out the effect of mothers’ welfare participation during childhood on daughters’ economic outcomes in adulthood in the pre- and post-welfare reform periods.
Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of welfare reform experiments suggesting that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. Using data on Connecticut’s Jobs First experiment, we find no evidence of behavioral-induced participation at the highest conditional quantiles of earnings. We offer a simple explanation for this: women assigned to Jobs First incur welfare participation costs to labor supply at higher earnings where the control group is welfare ineligible.
This paper discusses the history of the TANF program, participation, and spending. Also discussed are the goals of TANF legislation, changes in rules regarding utilization of cash welfare, especially the introduction of work requirements under the 1996 legislation. The author also offers a theorhetical discussion and a review of the empirical literature regarding TANF. The paper was prepared for a National Business and Economic Research conference on Dec. 5-6, 2014.
Leading up to the passage of the 1996 welfare reform, there was much speculation and debate over the possibility that states would \race to the bottom" in setting welfare generosity if given more control over their individual programs. In the fteen years after welfare reform, did such a race to the bottom ensue? Using a spatial dynamic econometric approach, I investigate welfare competition across multiple policy instruments and across three distinct welfare periods -- the AFDC regime, the experimental waiver period leading up to the reform, and the TANF era.
The proportion of low-income, single mothers not receiving public assistance or participating in the formal employment sector has approximately doubled over the past decade. Many of the currently debated policy options to support these families focus on state level programs. However, little is known about the relationships between state welfare program characteristics and disconnectedness. This project assesses the effect of state welfare rules on the likelihood of being disconnected from these two income sources.
