The Impact of Earnings Disregards on the Behavior of Low‐Income Families

This paper investigates the impact of changes in earnings disregards for welfare assistance received by single mothers following welfare reform in 1996. Some states adopted much higher earnings disregards (women could work full‐time and still receive substantial welfare benefits), while other states did not. We explore the effect of these changes on women's labor supply and income using several data sources and multiple estimation strategies. Our results indicate these changes had little effect on labor supply or income. We show this is because surprisingly few women used the earnings disregards. We discuss several explanations for why this might occur.     

Packaging Support for Low‐Income Families: Policy Variation across the United States

This paper addresses a gap in state‐level comparative social policy research by analyzing policies that support low‐income families with children. Variation in state policy “packages” is measured by considering three characteristics of 11 social programs. Individual measures of policy are found to be weakly and inconsistently inter‐correlated at the state level, but when cluster analysis is used to analyze multiple dimensions simultaneously, five clusters or regime types are identified that have distinctive policy approaches. These range from the most minimal provisions, to conservative approaches emphasizing private responsibility, to integrated approaches that combine generous direct assistance with employment support and policies that enforce family responsibility. A comparison of a subset of programs at two points in time (1994 and 1998) suggests that states made substantial changes in cash assistance and taxation policies after the 1996 federal welfare reforms. The magnitude and direction of these changes remained consistent with the state clusters identified in 1994. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

The Influence of Low‐Income Children's Participation in Head Start on Their Parents’ Education and Employment

Head Start is the oldest and largest federally funded preschool program in the United States. From its inception in 1965, Head Start not only provided early childhood education, care, and services for children, but also sought to promote parents’ success. However, almost all evaluation studies of Head Start have focused solely on children's cognitive and social outcomes rather than on parents’ outcomes. The present study examines whether children's participation in Head Start promotes parents’ educational advancement and employment. We use data from the Head Start Impact Study (HSIS), a randomized trial of over 4,000 newly entering three‐ and four‐year‐old children. We find that parents of children in the three‐year‐old cohort (but not the four‐year‐old cohort), who were randomly assigned to and participated in Head Start, had steeper increases in their own educational attainment by child age six years compared to parents of children in the control group. This pattern is especially strong for parents who had at least some college experience at baseline, as well as for African‐American parents. We do not find evidence that Head Start helped parents enter or return to the workforce over time. Results are discussed in the context of using high‐quality early childhood education as a platform for improving both child and parent outcomes.     

The Impact of Child Care Subsidies on Single Mothers’ Work Effort

Access to affordable child care is a formidable barrier to employment for many families. Following passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 , funding for child care assistance increased dramatically. Using data from the National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), the impact of child care subsidies on single mother’s work effort is evaluated. The results indicate that not only are women more likely to be employed when they receive child care subsidies, they are also more likely to be employed full time. Single mothers who reported receiving assistance with child care worked, on average, 9.4 hours more per week than mother’s who did not receive help. While growth in funding for child care has slowed in recent years, findings like the ones presented here highlight the importance of affordable child care in the employment decisions of mothers with young children.     

Government Assistance Protects Low‐Income Families from Eviction

A lack of affordable housing is a pressing issue for many low‐income American families and can lead to eviction from their homes. Housing assistance programs to address this problem include public housing and other assistance, including vouchers, through which a government agency offsets the cost of private market housing. This paper assesses whether the receipt of either category of assistance reduces the probability that a family will be evicted from their home in the subsequent six years. Because no randomized trial has assessed these effects, we use observational data and formalize the conditions under which a causal interpretation is warranted. Families living in public housing experience less eviction conditional on pre‐treatment variables. We argue that this evidence points toward a causal conclusion that assistance, particularly public housing, protects families from eviction.     

Low‐Income Housing Development,Poverty Concentration,and Neighborhood Inequality

Considerable debate exists about the merits of place‐based programs that steer new development, and particularly affordable housing development, into low‐income neighborhoods. Exploiting quasi‐experimental variation in incentives to construct and rehabilitate rental housing across neighborhoods generated by Low‐Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program rules, we explore the impacts of subsidized development on local housing construction, poverty concentration, and neighborhood inequality. While a large fraction of rental housing development spurred by the program is offset by a reduction in the number of new unsubsidized units, housing investment under the LIHTC has measurable effects on the distribution of income within and across communities. However, there is little evidence the program contributes meaningfully to poverty concentration or residential segregation.     

The Impact of Child‐Care Subsidies on Child Development: Evidence from Geographic Variation in the Distance to Social Service Agencies

In this paper, we examine the impact of U.S. child‐care subsidies on the cognitive and behavioral development of children in low‐income female‐headed families. We identify the effect of subsidy receipt by exploiting geographic variation in the distance that families must travel from home to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, our instrumental variables estimates suggest that children receiving subsidized child care in the year before kindergarten score lower on tests of cognitive ability and reveal more behavior problems throughout kindergarten. An auxiliary analysis of longer‐run outcomes shows that these negative effects largely disappear by the time children finish first grade.     

The Impact of Home‐Based Child Care Provider Unionization on the Cost,Type, and Availability of Subsidized Child Care in Illinois

In February 2005, Illinois became the first U.S. state to grant home‐based child care providers (HBCPs) the right to form a labor union in order to bargain collectively with the state government. This policy inspired similar efforts across the country and represents a potentially important direction for child care policy. To date, the implications of labor unions for the cost, type, and availability of subsidized child care have not been evaluated empirically. In this study, we examine the impact of granting Illinois HBCPs the right to form a labor union on (a) the type of child care (licensed vs. license‐exempt/home‐based vs. center‐based) used by subsidy‐receiving Illinois infants and toddlers; (b) the per‐child cost of subsidized child care for infants and toddlers; and (c) the percentage of Illinois infants and toddlers who use child care subsidies. To conduct these analyses, we combine data from the Current Population Survey with Child Care and Development Fund administrative records on U.S. infants and toddlers whose families received child care subsidies during the period from 2002 to 2008. We use both a traditional difference‐in‐differences as well as a comparative case study with a “synthetic” control group approach. The synthetic control group approach improves on traditional comparative case studies by providing a transparent, empirical approach for constructing the counterfactual, documenting comparison units’ contribution to the synthetically created control group and detailing the degree to which the synthetic control group is, or is not, similar to the treated unit on preintervention measures of the outcome as well as on other selected characteristics. We find that subsidy‐receiving Illinois infants and toddlers spent an average of between 6.4 and 7 percentage points more hours in licensed care settings, as compared to license‐exempt settings, in the three years following child care unionization. We also find that between 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points fewer Illinois infants and toddlers used child care subsidies following unionization.     

Innovation in Welfare Policy: Evaluating State Efforts to Encourage Work among Low‐Income Families1

This article examines what states are doing to help Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) recipients move into the workforce and become self‐supporting. We first present documentation regarding many different state TANF policies aimed at encouraging work, including benefit structures, time limits, work requirements, sanctions, and work supports. We then discuss how effective these policies are at helping welfare recipients get jobs and increase their income, by reviewing research on each of these elements. We conclude that the TANF program has been effective in increasing employment and decreasing welfare caseloads and expenses, but that this has not resulted in overall income gains for welfare recipients in the long run. We also conclude that the most promising state programs have a strong employment focus combined with focused training and educational opportunities. In addition, we also find that sanctions appear to be harming those most in need of assistance, and therefore that such policies should be reevaluated and refocused.     

Partnering and Parenting in Poverty: A Qualitative Analysis of a Relationship Skills Program for Low‐Income,Unmarried Families

Since the mid‐1990s, the federal government has funded numerous relationship skills programs, including some specifically targeting low‐income, unmarried parents, in an effort to strengthen couples’ relationships and increase family stability. The previous research on the effectiveness of these interventions has revealed mixed results about whether such programs can improve the relationships of lower income couples who tend to experience lower relationship quality, lower marriage rates, and higher rates of relationship dissolution. This article draws on in‐depth qualitative data collected during an 18‐month ethnographic study of one federally funded relationship skills program for unmarried, low‐income couples expecting a new baby. Overall, though parents found the financial management lessons included in the classes only minimally useful, if at all, they found other aspects of the program particularly useful for three main reasons: (1) classes allowed parents to focus exclusively on their couple relationships in ways they rarely did otherwise; (2) program incentives helped parents make financial ends meet that month; and (3) parents learned that the challenges they personally experienced were often endemic to the romantic and co‐parenting relationships of unmarried parents who have few resources and experience more challenges that tend to undermine relationship quality, such as financial stress and relational ambiguity. Engaging with other couples around shared challenges normalized couples’ relationship problems and lessened the resentment and animosity that typically characterized their partner interactions. These findings have important implications for healthy marriage and relationship policy. Program developers should avoid lessons that imply low‐income, unmarried parents’ spending habits and family‐formation decisions are deficient. Interventions should instead encourage couples to discuss their shared challenges and minimize their tendency to individualize relational and financial strain.     

The Internationalization of Early Childhood Education and Care Issues: Framing Gender Justice and Child Well‐Being

This article investigates the extent to which early childhood education and care (ECEC) issues have been internationalized to become the focus of attention of a number of international organizations (IOs). Through an examination of policy statements and other primary documents, the article explores how these IOs frame the ECEC policy debate. While a great deal of those IOs' recommendations are increasingly cast in human capital development terms, multiple and competing frames are in evidence: one that rests on more social pedagogic norms that promote a concern for the well‐being of the “whole child”; another that focuses on children's rights to services and countries' obligations to deliver services; and another that focuses on parental employment concerns and the connection between ECEC policies and programs and women's employment. The article examines each of the frames in evidence and evaluates their ability to address concerns of both gender justice and child well‐being.     

Demographic,Employment, Expenditure,and Income‐Related Dependency Ratios: Population Aging in the Fifty States

Old‐age dependency ratios (OADR) are frequently used to measure the economic impact of U.S. population aging. However, at the state level youth‐dependence, and the “birth dearth,” are important. While federal expenditures on elder Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are large, state expenditures on dependent youth are much higher than on elders. The states are ranked by the OADR and three other dependency ratios that consider youth and a state's employment, fiscal outlay, and per‐capita income. Very different rankings are found. States with higher OADR ratios had lower total dependency expenditures. Projections for 2030 are compared with 2000 results.     

Institutions and Ideology: Sources of Opposition to Federal Regulation of Child Care Services in Canada and the United States

This article explores the impact of federal political arrangements and conservative ideology on provisions for regulating child care services embodied in the major proposals for child care legislation under consideration in Canada and the United States during the late 1980s. The initial contrast between the non-centralized approach taken in Bill C-144 (Canada) and the more centralized approach originally proposed in the Act for Better Child Care Services (United States) was a function of differences in the two countries' federal systems. However, conservative preferences and pressures contributed to the eventual adoption of a non-centralized approach in both countries. Federalism facilitated this expression of conservative ideology by providing supporters of a non-centralized approach with resources (constitutional and institutional) with which to pursue their policy preference, and a political rhetoric with which it could be justified.     

Early Impacts of the Affordable Care Act on Health Insurance Coverage in Medicaid Expansion and Non‐Expansion States

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to achieve nearly universal health insurance coverage in the United States through a combination of insurance market reforms, mandates, subsidies, health insurance exchanges, and Medicaid expansions, most of which took effect in 2014. This paper estimates the causal effects of the ACA on health insurance coverage in 2014 using data from the American Community Survey. We utilize difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences models that exploit cross‐sectional variation in the intensity of treatment arising from state participation in the Medicaid expansion and local area pre‐ACA uninsured rates. This strategy allows us to identify the effects of the ACA in both Medicaid expansion and non‐expansion states. Our preferred specification suggests that, at the average pre‐treatment uninsured rate, the full ACA increased the proportion of residents with insurance by 5.9 percentage points compared to 2.8 percentage points in states that did not expand Medicaid. Private insurance expansions from the ACA were due to increases in both employer‐provided and non‐group coverage. The coverage gains from the full ACA were largest for those without a college degree, non‐whites, young adults, unmarried individuals, and those without children in the home. We find no evidence that the Medicaid expansion crowded out private coverage.     

Health‐Care Data Protection and Biometric Authentication Policies: Comparative Culture and Technology Acceptance in China and in the United States

A proliferation of health information technology (HIT) policies to implement dimensions of e‐health, including electronic medical records, electronic health records, personal health records, and e‐prescribing—along with expanding initiatives on mobile health in developed countries and emerging technologies—has sparked academic inquiry into the protection of privacy and data and the technology to protect privacy and data. This article examines HIT policies in the United States and in China and the use of authentication technologies to assess biometrics as privacy's friend or foe in different political frameworks with varying conceptions of privacy. An analysis of privacy in the context of health data protection, challenging relations of trust between patients and providers, the increasing perspective of health data integrity as a cyber‐security issue, and the growing rate of medical fraud and medical identity theft may yield findings of a convergence of views of privacy and biometrics unexpected of contrasting political cultures.     

Debt administration in Small Island‐States

Public debt management is an infrequent focus of public administration studies. Yet without appropriate debt management, administrators have few financial resources for public service provision. Island‐state administrators face an enhanced service provision challenge. The peculiarity of island‐state economies, the unpredictability of exogenous events and the state's endogenous choices increase debt administration's importance. Via its focus on debt management office location and the administrative constraints posed by brain drain, transparency and regionalization, this paper goes beyond typical debt management studies to engage debt administration spaces. The result is a framework for studies of debt administration in Small Island‐States.     

Delegation and Institutional Design in Health‐Care Rationing

The delegation of decision‐making powers to nonmajoritarian, independent agencies has become a significant phenomenon in more and more policy areas. One of these is the health‐care sector, where decisions on the range of services covered within public systems have, in most developed countries, been delegated to specialized bodies. This article offers an analytical framework that seeks to grasp the empirical variety and complexity of delegative processes and appointed institutions. The framework is used to describe decision‐making processes and institutions in six countries: Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. We find that, although constrained by preexisting institutional structures and traditions, delegators enjoy a considerable degree of discretion in their institutional design choices and engage in strategic design and redesign of appointed bodies.     

Better than Nothing: How Policies Influence Political Participation in Low‐Capacity Democracies

A growing body of policy feedback work demonstrates that citizens' experiences with public policy influence the way they participate in politics. Most of this work takes place in advanced industrial democracies, but the nuances of policy design influencing participation in advanced democracies are often irrelevant for those in low‐capacity democracies. This study extends the policy feedback framework to address how policies might “feed back” differently in low‐capacity countries with uneven basic service delivery. In low‐capacity democracies, the most salient distinction is between those who have access to basic state‐provided services and those who do not. Using original data collected in Zambia, it demonstrates that those who have even marginal access to state services have higher levels of political engagement and political participation than those without access, indicating that imperfect extension of services may help boost democratic citizenship in developing countries.