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Coonoor Behal

Welfare Reform and the Work Support System | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...welfare-sawhill

welfarereform work EITC policy 1996 povertyprograms worksupport

shared by Coonoor Behal on 09 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Among other provisions, the 1996 reforms required work of almost every adult that joined the welfare rolls. In addition, with some exceptions, a limit of five years was placed on the receipt of cash welfare by individual families.
  • Beginning roughly in the mid-1970s with the enactment of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the federal government originated or expanded a series of programs that provide benefits to working families. Unlike welfare benefits, which are intended primarily for the destitute, these work support benefits are designed to provide cash and other benefits to working adults and their families. In addition to the EITC, the major benefits in the system include the child tax credit, the minimum wage, state income supplement programs, food stamps, health insurance, and child care.
  • This evolution toward a work-based system of support progressed further as a result of state responses to the 1996 welfare law.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • As a result, the typical one-parent family with children was far better off working than on welfare, and employment rates among this group increased dramatically, due to the strong economy of the 1990s, welfare reform, and the availability of these expanded work supports
  • The value of these new work support programs at both the federal and state level cannot be overemphasized. The EITC alone provides roughly $4,000 a year in extra benefits to a low-wage worker with two or more children, and the children remain eligible for Medicaid. The average woman leaving welfare earns about $7 an hour, or $13,000 in after-tax income. The combined value of food stamps and the EITC, then, brings her total income up to about $19,000—enough to boost a single parent family with three or fewer children above the federal poverty line
  • Polls show that the public is willing to do more for those who work.
  • Many of these policies respond to complaints that the 1996 welfare law placed too much emphasis on reducing caseloads and not enough on reducing poverty.
  • The work support system serves three primary goals. First, it provides incentives for work.
  • A second goal of the work support system is to help ensure that parents working at low-wage jobs have enough total income to provide an adequate standard of living.
  • The third goal of the work support system is to insure that those who lose their jobs or cannot find work will not be destitute.
  • The minimum wage is not very well-targeted. Only one quarter of minimum-wage earners live in poor families.
  • By 2000, the federal EITC was providing over $30 billion in cash supplements to working families, making it the biggest program other than Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income that provides benefits to low-income families. And unlike nearly every other program for low-income families, it provides benefits only to families that work. It is, in short, the quintessential work support program.
  • States have taken two major approaches to improving work incentives. First, since enactment of the 1996 reforms, nearly every state has allowed parents who find jobs to retain more of their welfare benefit. This policy enables many families to work and continue receiving earnings supplements from welfare.
  • under current federal rules, working families can exhaust their five-year limit on welfare while receiving just a small supplement to their earnings. For this reason, time limits may actually discourage work
  • A second approach states have followed is to create their own EITC programs.
  • nearly all the families leaving welfare are eligible for food stamps
  • less than half the families leaving welfare receive the food stamp benefits to which they are entitled.
Coonoor Behal

Memberships Theory of Poverty: The Role of Group Affiliations in Determining Socioecono... - 0 views

www.irp.wisc.edu/...dp122101.pdf

behaviors behaviorchange behavioraleconomics groups membership policy

shared by Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13
     
    This paper describes a particular perspective on the causes of poverty: a memberships based theory. The idea of this theory is that an individual's socioeconomic prospects are strongly influenced by the groups to which he is attached over the course of his life. Such groups may be endogenous; examples include residential neighborhoods, schools and firms. Other groups are exogenous, including ethnicity and gender. I describe the main ideas of the memberships theory, characterize the empirical evidence in its support, and remark on its implications for anti-poverty policy.
Vetan Kapoor

Notes from "Poverty in America" by John Iceland (2012) - 0 views

Poverty in America: A Handbook (John Iceland, 2012) Chapter 4: Characteristics of the Poverty Population * 22.4% of Americans were poor in 1959, 11.1% in 1973, and 12.5% in 2003 * 70% of impoveri...

notes povertytraits books stats

started by Vetan Kapoor on 22 Mar 13 no follow-up yet
Coonoor Behal

Interventions to Break and Create Consumer Habits - 0 views

dornsife.usc.edu/...Verplanken.Wood.2006.pdf

behavioraleconomics decisionmaking incentives consumers downstream upstream environment habit habitchange

shared by Coonoor Behal on 26 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 26 Mar 13
     
    Interventions to change everyday behaviors often attempt to change people's beliefs and intentions. As the authors explain, these interventions are unlikely to be an effective means to change behaviors that people have repeated into habits. Successful habit change interventions involve disrupting the environmental factors that automatically cue habit performance. The authors propose two potential habit change interventions. "Downstream-plus" interventions provide informational input at points when habits are vulnerable to change, such as when people are undergoing naturally occurring changes in performance environments for many everyday actions (e.g., moving households, changing jobs). "Upstream" interventions occur before habit performance and disrupt old environmental cues and establish new ones. Policy interventions can be oriented not only to the change of established habits but also to the acquisition and maintenance of new behaviors through the formation of new habits.
Coonoor Behal

Behavioral Economics and Marketing in Aid of Decision Making Among the Poor - 2 views

psych.princeton.edu/...aking%20among%20the%20poor.pdf

behavioraleconomics marketing ideas42 decisionmaking programdesign TANF

shared by Coonoor Behal on 24 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 24 Mar 13
     
    This article considers several aspects of the economic decision making of the poor from the perspective of behavioral economics, and it focuses on potential contributions from marketing. Among other things, the authors consider some relevant facets of the social and institutional environments in which the poor interact, and they review some behavioral patterns that are likely to arise in these contexts. A behaviorally more informed perspective can help make sense of what might otherwise be considered "puzzles" in the economic comportment of the poor. A behavioral analysis suggests that substantial welfare changes could result from relatively minor policy interventions, and insightful marketing may provide much needed help in the design of such interventions.
Coonoor Behal

TANF Data and Documentation: Main Page (2000-2009) - 0 views

aspe.hhs.gov/...index.shtml

TANF data HHS

shared by Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13
     
    The TANF Typologies Database contains welfare policy variables, state economic and demographic variables, and the six key outcomes variables that they are hypothesized to affect. The database is no longer updated or maintained by the Urban Institute.
Coonoor Behal

Potential Interviews - 2 views

Sheldon Danziger, a University of Michigan public policy professor who specializes in poverty.

interviews

started by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 4 follow-ups, last by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12
Coonoor Behal

Casey B. Mulligan: Poverty Should Have Risen - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...poverty-should-have-risen

incentives perpetuatingpoverty recession povertyline povertyprograms

shared by Coonoor Behal on 05 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • When measured to include taxes and government benefits, poverty did not rise between 2007 and 2011, and that shows why government policy is seriously off track.
  • rnment help, that amounts to 100 percent taxation (providing more benefits as income falls is sometimes called “implicit taxation”).
  • It is almost as if our present programs of public assistance had been consciously contrived to perpetuate the conditions they are supposed to alleviate.
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  • Under the Obama administration, workers with disposable income in the neighborhood of the poverty line did not, on average, see their job losses during the recession translate into significant reductions in their disposable income.
  • it is possible for the government to help too much
  • The results suggest that the government was helping too much.
  • the percentage of people in households with disposable income less than the poverty line was 15 percent in 2011, just as it was in 2007 before the recession began.
  • Erasing incentives is not the way to a civilized society but rather to an impoverished one.
Coonoor Behal

Involvement of TANF Applicants with Child Protective Services (July 2001) - 0 views

www.irp.wisc.edu/...dp122901.pdf

behaviors policy TANF children overlap data

shared by Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 15 Feb 13
     
    This paper presents findings from an exploratory study of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) applicants in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. We examine the level of involvement of TANF applicants with the child welfare system both before and after their application for TANF assistance and inclusion in our study. We also present preliminary multivariate models of the hazard of our sample's CPS involvement with child protective services subsequent to their application for TANF. We find a high level of overlap between TANF and child welfare populations. We also find a set of correlates of CPS involvement after TANF application that are robust to a variety of model specifications. Although our findings are preliminary and further analyses based on longer-term follow-up of our sample will no doubt provide greater clarity, we believe that our findings to date provide food for thought for the designers and administrators of both TANF and child welfare programs.
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