Changes In Welfare Policy Research Articles

Estimating demand elasticities using nonlinear pricing

Nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care, public utilities, and telecommunications. However, this pricing scheme introduces bias into estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes. I develop a local elasticity estimation method that uses nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers' expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases. This method improves over previous approaches by using commonly-available observational data and requiring only a single general monotonicity assumption. Using claims-level data on health insurance with two nonlinearities, I am able to measure two separate elasticities, and find that elasticity declines from −0.26 to−0.09 by the second nonlinearity. These estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss. This method enables estimation of many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address.

DIE GEMEENSKAPSWERKDIENSTE VAN DIE PRIVATE WELSYNSEKTOR: ’N PROFIEL MET IMPLIKASIES

The practical implications of the significant changes in social and welfare policy that occurred from 1994 to 1999, are as yet unknown. This is mainly due to the lack of empirical research data on this issue. This deficiency was partly addressed in a study on the nature of the private welfare sector’s community work services in the North West Province during 2000. The aim of the study was to compile a profile of the Province’s community work services and to utilise this profile in the formulation of guidelines for improved future service delivery. In the study, both community work theory and the South African social and welfare policies were used in the development of a classification framework for community work services. This framework formed the basis of a questionnaire that was sent to all private welfare organisations in the Province. The collected data was analysed and, together with policy dictates, used for the development of guidelines. It was firstly found that there was a discernable move towards targeting policy designated client systems. However, the services did still not fully comply with policy requirements or South Africa’s considerable development needs. Certain deficiencies in the service delivery process were also identified. Therefore, guidelines for addressing both these imbalances and deficiencies were formulated. It was thirdly found that the new classification framework could be constructively used in both further research and in practice.

The Effect of Workfare on Crime: Incapacitation and Program Effects

In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous welfare policy changes in Denmark. Our results show a strong decline in the crime rate among treated unemployment uninsured men relative to untreated uninsured and unemployment insured men, and part of this decline can be identified as a direct effect of workfare participation. Moreover, we find that criminal activity was also reduced during weekends, when the workfare programs were closed, allowing us to distinguishing the pure program effect from the incapacitation effect. These results imply a strong and potentially lasting crime reducing effect of workfare policy.

The Heterogeneity Politics of the Welfare State: Changing Population Heterogeneity and Welfare State Policies in High‐Income OECD Countries, 1980‐2005

Whether and how developments and changes in welfare state policies are related with population heterogeneity has been a subject of contention. This article examines this relationship using data on welfare state provisions and practices, and ethno‐racial, religious, and immigration heterogeneity, from 17 high‐income Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development countries between 1980 and 2005. Findings suggest that while religious diversity lacks a systematic association with welfare state policies, the relationship of ethno‐racial and especially immigration diversity bifurcates between welfare state decommodification and expenditures. The welfare state expenditure‐increasing and welfare‐state‐provision‐decreasing roles of immigration, in particular, provide important insights into why welfare state policies may have been limited in some countries and lately scaled back in others.Related Articles: Gainous, Jason, Stephen C. Craig, and Michael D. Martinez. 2008. “.” Politics & Policy 36 (): 972‐1004. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2008.00147.x/abstract Byrne, Jennifer. 2011. “.” Politics & Policy 39 (): 485‐514. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00301.x/abstract Flavin, Patrick, Alexander C. Pacek, and Benjamin Radcliff. 2011. “.” Politics & Policy 29 (): 251‐269. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2011.00290.x/abstract Related Media:Databases: by Wagle, Udaya. 2013. “.” http://homepages.wmich.edu/~uwagle/ . https://www.cia.gov/

Trends in Child Protection and Out-of-Home Care

Over the past decades, increased knowledge about childhood abuse and trauma have prompted changes in child welfare policy, and practice that may have affected the out-of-home (OOH) care population. However, little is known about recent national trends in child maltreatment, OOH placement, or characteristics of children in OOH care. The objective of this study was to examine trends in child maltreatment and characteristics of children in OOH care. We analyzed 2 federal administrative databases to identify and characterize US children who were maltreated (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System) or in OOH care (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System). We assessed trends between 2000 and 2010. The number of suspected maltreatment cases increased 17% from 2000 to 2010, yet the number of substantiated cases decreased 7% and the number of children in OOH care decreased 25%. Despite the decrease in OOH placements, we found a 19% increase in the number of children who entered OOH care because of maltreatment (vs other causes), a 36% increase in the number of children with multiple (vs single) types of maltreatment, and a 60% increase in the number of children in OOH care identified as emotionally disturbed. From 2000 to 2010, fewer suspected cases of maltreatment were substantiated, despite increased investigations, and fewer maltreated children were placed in OOH care. These changes may have led to a smaller but more complex OOH care population with substantial previous trauma and emotional problems.

The Development of Foster Care Privatization Policy in Florida: An Application of Kingdon's Policy Development Model

This study focused on the context surrounding the development of Florida's foster care privatization policy. Using a retrospective case study method, documents regarding the development of Florida's foster care privatization policy were collected and analyzed. Results suggest that the policy evolved in a manner consistent with Kingdon's (1984) policy development model, which incorporates factors in the political, problem, and policy domains. Alignment of opportunities in these domains set the stage for this policy's adoption. These findings build on those found in the research literature and provide a base for further research on the topic of child welfare policy change.

Housing Assistance and Disconnection from Welfare and Work: Assessing the Impacts of Public Housing and Tenant-based Rental Subsidies

The well-being of families disconnected from welfare and work are of growing concern to policymakers. This article examines the relationship between economic disconnection and housing assistance, a critical source of support that subsidizes what is the largest fixed expense for most households. Results from multilevel logistic models show that the odds of being disconnected are higher for public housing residents and lower for single mothers receiving tenantbased rental assistance in comparison to those in private housing. Findings indicate that housing policies should be considered alongside welfare policy changes aimed at economically disconnected families, and that public housing is a critical site for interventions.

The Effects of Welfare Policy Changes on the Finance of Local Government since 2005

The Effects of Welfare Policy Changes on the Finance of Local Government since 2005

Estimating Demand Elasticities Using Nonlinear Pricing

Nonlinear pricing is prevalent in industries such as health care, public utilities, and telecommunications. However, nonlinear pricing in these sectors causes bias when estimating elasticities for welfare analysis or policy changes. This paper develops a local elasticity estimation method that takes advantage of nonlinear price schedules to isolate consumers' expenditure choices from selection and simultaneity biases. This method improves over previous approaches because it uses commonly-available observational data and requires a single general monotonicity assumption. Using detailed claims-level health insurance data with two nonlinearities, this paper measures declining elasticities from -0.26 to -0.09 along initial expenditure ranges, in contrast to previous work which aggregates over a skewed spending distribution. These estimates are then used to calculate moral hazard deadweight loss. This method enables estimation on many policies with nonlinear pricing which previous tools could not address.

Welfare Reform, Living Arrangements, and Economic Well-Being: A Synthesis of Literature

A primary objective of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) is reducing single mothers' dependence on the welfare system. This objective is sought not only through increased work, but also through changes in household structure — particularly encouraging healthy marriages and the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Indeed, moving from a one-parent to a two-parent family may have positive implications for the economic well-being of families with children.This literature review focuses on the relationships between welfare reform, household structure, economic well-being, and resource sharing. In particular, we address two questions:Have changes in welfare policies in the 1990s affected household structure? What are the effects of household structure on economic well-being and intra-household resource sharing? Studies examining these research questions have used qualitative and quantitative (both nonexperimental and experimental) methods. The qualitative studies reviewed are based on in-depth interviews with relatively few respondents; the nonexperimental quantitative studies are, for the most part, carried out with large-scale nationally representative data sets; and the experimental quantitative studies use both state administrative and welfare client survey data, and are based on random assignment designs. The effects of welfare reform on living arrangements have been examined using nonexperimental quantitative and experimental quantitative methods, while studies of the effects of living arrangements on economic well-being and resource sharing have used qualitative and nonexperimental quantitative methods.

Neoliberalism, Race, and the American Welfare State

Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race. By Joe Soss, Richard C. Fording, and Sanford F. Schram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 368p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.It is more than 15 years since the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act was passed in 1996, famously described by then-President Bill Clinton as “the end of welfare as we know it.” In Disciplining the Poor, Joe Soss, Richard Fording, and Sanford Schram analyze recent changes in US welfare policy as reflections of broader transformations of the “governance” of poverty, arguing that these transformations represent a new form of “neoliberal paternalism” in which race continues to be an important element. In this symposium, a diverse group of political scientists working on welfare issues have been asked to critically assess the book's account and to comment more broadly on the importance of the “governance of poverty” to the future of American politics.—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Diffusion and Governance of ‘Barnahus’ in the Nordic Countries: Report from an On-going Project

This paper constitutes a report from an on-going research project aimed at comparing diffusion and governance of Barnahus in the Nordic countries. Barnahus can be considered as one of the main policy ventures related to children as crime victims in recent years, building on close inter-agency collaboration under one roof. The project's focus is on how forms of diffusion and governance affect the tension between criminal and welfare law in the respective countries. In addition, variations regarding the role of governmental and voluntary or informal actors in the processes of diffusion and governance are of central concern, as well as interactions between the countries. The paper primarily presents the theoretical framework for the study, building on institutional theory, a sociology of law perspective on governance, and a power perspective. Moreover, methodological and empirical considerations are discussed in relation to the framework. Finally, the paper reflects on what the project brings to future criminological research, highlighting the knowledge on institutional circumstances, governance structures, and the balance between punishment and treatment concerning children as crime victims in the Nordic countries. More generally, the interdisciplinary framework contributes with a possibility of understanding and analyzing contemporary changes in criminal and welfare policy.

The politics and policy of inclusion and technology in Paralympic sport: beyond Pistorius

This article re-examines some of the complex policy issues and politics associated with two key features of the contemporary Paralympic sport movement: the inclusion in mainstream sports competitions of disabled athletes and the sports in which they complete, and the use by disabled athletes of various technologies to assist their performance. It is argued that, at least at an ideological level, there is a strong link between the inclusion of disabled athletes, the sports they play, and the events in which they compete in mainstream settings, and the idea that inclusion helps change social attitudes towards disabled people and enhance their sporting experiences is one which is frequently stressed by many people involved in both Olympic and Paralympic sport. An examination of certain aspects of the organization of Paralympic sport, and of sport more broadly, however, casts some doubt on the assumed benefits of inclusion and the promotion of more favourable attitudes and experiences among disabled people and other members of the wider society. In particular, it is argued that it is churlish to expect that hosting a single one-off sporting event such as the London 2012 Paralympic Games will have the effect of reversing the deep-seated inequalities and complex social problems that have long beset the lives of many disabled people, and which are likely to be hardened by controversial changes in social welfare policy in Britain and elsewhere.

Government policy and women in the labour market: The importance of public sector employment

Women have made important quantitative and qualitative gains in the labour market in recent years. A key feature of women’s employment is their disproportionate concentration in the public sector, and this helps to explain the advances they have made in the labour market given the availability of high quality jobs and opportunities for skills development in this sector across many local areas. This article explores how ongoing economic, labour market and welfare policy changes may undo some of the progress that has been made by women in the labour market, especially because of their vulnerability to job cuts in the public sector, the spatially uneven impact of such job losses and the particular dependence of women on local employment opportunities.

Housing in the welfare state: Partitioning places and people

The language of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, social exclusion and social and spatial segregation has been prominent in policy debates in the UK in recent decades and has been associated with failures in health, education, employment, crime and other policies. But while these patterns are seen as creating problems the underlying trend towards increased social and spatial division has been speeded by policy changes. Cities, towns and neighbourhoods in the UK have been shaped and reshaped by the national and local welfare state especially through housing and planning policies. This short article examines the likely effects of the current round of welfare reform and policy change, and argues that they promise to further erode the effects of earlier interventions and create a more difficult context for social and economic success.

Effects of Welfare Reform on Illicit Drug Use Of Adult Women.

Exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time and comparing relevant population subgroups within an econometric difference-in-differences framework, we estimate the effects of welfare reform on adult women's illicit drug use from 1992 to 2002, the period during which welfare reform unfolded in the U.S. The analyses are based on all available and appropriate national datasets, each offering unique strengths and measuring a different drug-related outcome. We investigate self-reported illicit drug use (from the National Household Surveys on Drug Abuse and National Surveys on Drug Use and Health), drug-related prison admissions (from the National Corrections Reporting Program), drug-related arrests (from Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports), and drug-related emergency department episodes (from the Drug Abuse Warning Network). We find robust evidence that welfare reform led to a 10-21% decline in illicit drug use among women at risk of relying on welfare, as well as associated declines in drug-related arrests (6-7%), drug-related hospital emergency department episodes (7-11%), and possibly drug-related prison admissions (11-19%). The findings indicate that an appropriately designed system with sufficient job opportunities for those are able to work can result in both increases in employment and decreases in drug use.

Incentives, contract policy, and disrespect: a critical normative analysis of changes in welfare policy leading to the disrespect of ethnic minorities in Denmark

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the theoretical discussion concerning the good and the just by means of an empirical case. Drawing on Honneth's theory of recognition, a critical analysis of changes in Danish social and labor market policy is carried out. It is shown that discriminatory social benefits to ethnic minorities lead to feelings of disrespect among the recipients. The confrontation of theory and empirical evidence substantiates Honneth's theory on the importance of equal legal rights. At the same time, it questions Nancy Fraser's attempt to make a logical distinction between redistribution and recognition. Still, however, Fraser may be right that Honneth has too little to say about justice. Therefore, the article concludes that his theory must be supplied with a stronger notion of just procedures and, most importantly, with a concept of judgment, since rules and ethics are always interpreted by a judgment in situations.

Rethinking Care Through Social Reproduction: Articulating Circuits of Migration

Care has come to dominate much feminist research on globalized migrations and the transfer of labor from the South to the North, while the older concept of reproduction had been pushed into the background but is now becoming the subject of debates on the commodification of care in the household and changes in welfare state policies. This article argues that we could achieve a better understanding of the different modalities and trajectories of care in the reproduction of individuals, families, and communities, both of migrant and nonmigrant populations by articulating the diverse circuits of migration, in particular that of labor and the family. In doing this, I go back to the earlier North American writing on racialized minorities and migrants and stratified social reproduction. I also explore insights from current Asian studies of gendered circuits of migration connecting labor and marriage migrations as well as the notion of global householding that highlights the gender politics of social reproduction operating within and beyond households in institutional and welfare architectures. In contrast to Asia, there has relatively been little exploration in European studies of the articulation of labor and family migrations through the lens of social reproduction. However, connecting the different types of migration enables us to achieve a more complex understanding of care trajectories and their contribution to social reproduction.

Institutional fragmentation and coordination initiatives in western European welfare states

As a result of recent welfare state transformations, and most notably the reorientation of welfare states towards activation, the internal fragmentation of social security systems has emerged as a key policy problem in many western European countries. The types of response that have been adopted, however, vary substantially across countries, ranging from the encouragement of inter-agency collaboration to the outright merger of agencies. The purpose of this exploratory article is twofold. First, by proposing the concept of coordination initiatives, it tries to develop a better conceptualization of the cross-national diversity in responses to the fragmentation problem. Second, starting from existing theories of welfare state development and policy change, it presents first hypotheses accounting for the variation observed in coordination initiatives.

The Happiness of Single Mothers after Welfare Reform

Abstract U.S. welfare and tax policies targeting single mothers were transformed over a decade ago. What was the impact on single mothers’ happiness? Using data from the General Social Survey, difference in difference estimators are calculated. The results appear to indicate that the package of welfare and tax policy changes increased happiness. The results are largely consistent across three comparison groups and robust to various specification checks. This research nicely complements the literature by examining the impact of the welfare and tax policy changes on a novel outcome measure, self-reported happiness.