Welfare Program Participation Research Articles

What leads to measurement errors? Evidence from reports of program participation in three surveys

Measurement errors are often a large source of bias in survey data. Lack of knowledge of the determinants of such errors makes it difficult to reduce the extent of errors when collecting data and to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study the determinants of reporting error using high quality administrative data on government transfers linked to three major U.S. surveys. Our results support several theories of misreporting: Errors are related to event recall, forward and backward telescoping, salience of receipt, the stigma of reporting participation in welfare programs and respondent's degree of cooperation with the survey overall. We provide evidence on how survey design choices affect reporting errors. Our findings help survey users to gauge the reliability of their data and to devise estimation strategies that can correct for systematic errors, such as instrumental variable approaches. Understanding survey errors allows researchers collecting survey data to reduce them by improving survey design. Our results indicate that survey design should take into account that higher response rates as well as collecting more detailed information may have negative effects on survey accuracy.

Support seeking, system avoidance, and citizenship: Social safety net usage after incarceration

AbstractScholars have long described the American penal state and welfare state as joined by a common logic of social marginalization. But researchers have only recently begun to explore how the individuals who pass through the carceral system also interact with welfare state programs. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, in this article, I explore how formerly incarcerated individuals make claims on the welfare state and how participation varies across social programs and states, as well as by race, drawing on theories of social welfare rights‐claiming and system avoidance. In so doing, I provide the first nationwide estimates of the extent to which previously incarcerated adults use social safety net resources. I find that participation in welfare programs varies with incarceration history, program structure, and race. Rather than finding patterns consistent with system avoidance, I find that previously incarcerated White Americans seem to engage in active rights claiming, participating in public assistance programs more than similarly eligible never‐incarcerated counterparts. All formerly incarcerated individuals, however, have limited access to more generous social insurance programs, and the shift to an increasingly employment‐based social safety net seems likely to further limit access to the welfare state for the growing population of Americans leaving prison.

The consequences of job search monitoring for the long-term unemployed: Disability instead of employment?

We study the effect of job search monitoring (JSM) on individual labor market outcomes of the long-term unemployed. Exploiting the implementation of a JSM program targeted at jobseekers under the age of 49, we set up a regression discontinuity design that credibly identifies the program’s causal effect on unemployment, employment, and disability insurance (DI) participation and participation in other social welfare programs within a three-year period. We find that JSM increases exits from unemployment to DI without affecting transitions into employment or other social welfare programs. We further find that the effect of JSM on DI materializes before any sanction can be imposed and monitored individuals are still 10 percentage points more likely to be on DI three years after the start of monitoring. Ultimately, exploring fiscal implications reveals that the decrease in unemployment transfers as a result of JSM is entirely offset by the increase in DI transfers.

Development of a data-driven method for assessing health and welfare in the most common livestock species in Switzerland: The Smart Animal Health project.

Improving animal health and welfare in livestock systems depends on reliable proxies for assessment and monitoring. The aim of this project was to develop a novel method that relies on animal-based indicators and data-driven metrics for assessing health and welfare at farm level for the most common livestock species in Switzerland. Method development followed a uniform multi-stage process for each species. Scientific literature was systematically reviewed to identify potential health and welfare indicators for cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry. Suitable indicators were applied in the field and compared with outcomes of the Welfare Quality® scores of a given farm. To identify farms at risk for violations of animal welfare regulations, several agricultural and animal health databases were interconnected and various supervised machine-learning techniques were applied to model the status of farms. Literature reviews identified a variety of indicators, some of which are well established, while others lack reliability or practicability, or still need further validation. Data quality and availability strongly varied among animal species, with most data available for dairy cows and pigs. Data-based indicators were almost exclusively limited to the categories "Animal health" and "Husbandry and feeding". The assessment of "Appropriate behavior" and "Freedom from pain, suffering, harm and anxiety" depended largely on indicators that had to be assessed and monitored on-farm. The different machine-learning techniques used to identify farms for risk-based animal welfare inspections reached similar classification performances with sensitivities above 80%. Features with the highest predictive weights were: Participation in federal ecological and animal welfare programs, farm demographics and farmers' notification discipline for animal movements. A common method with individual sets of indicators for each species was developed. The results show that, depending on data availability for the individual animal categories, models based on proxy data can achieve high correlations with animal health and welfare assessed on-farm. Nevertheless, for sufficient validity, a combination of data-based indicators and on-farm assessments is currently required. For a broad implementation of the methods, alternatives to extensive manual on-farm assessments are needed, whereby smart farming technologies have great potential to support the assessment if the specific monitoring goals are defined.

How do low-income single-mothers get by when unemployment strikes: Patterns of multiple program participation after transition from employment to unemployment.

Little is known about longitudinal patterns of welfare program participation among single mothers after they transition from employment to unemployment. To better understand how utilization patterns of these welfare programs may change during the 12 months after a job loss, we used the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine the patterns of participation in Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and unemployment insurance among 342 single mothers who transitioned from employment to unemployment during the Great Recession. Using sequence analysis and cluster analysis, this paper identified four distinct patterns of program participation: (a) constantly receiving in-kind benefits; (b) primarily but not solely receiving food stamps; (c) inconsistent unemployment insurance or Medicaid-based benefits; and (d) limited or no benefits. Almost two-fifths of our sample of single mothers received inconsistent, limited, or no benefits. Results of the multinomial regression revealed that race, work disability, poverty, homeownership, and region of residence were significant factors that influenced whether study subjects participated in or had access to social safety net programs. Our findings illustrate the heterogeneity in patterns of multiple program participation among single mothers transitioning from employment to unemployment. Better understanding these varied patterns may inform decisions that increase the accessibility of US social safety net programs for single mothers during periods of personal economic hardship.

Early Prediction of At-Risk Students in Secondary Education: A Countrywide K-12 Learning Analytics Initiative in Uruguay

This paper describes a nationwide learning analytics initiative in Uruguay focused on the future implementation of governmental policies to mitigate student retention and dropouts in secondary education. For this, data from a total of 258,440 students were used to generate automated models to predict students at risk of failure or dropping out. Data were collected from primary and secondary education from different sources and for the period between 2015 and 2020. Such data contains demographic information about the students and their trajectories from the first grade of primary school to the second grade of secondary school (e.g., student assessments in different subjects over the years, the amount of absences, participation in social welfare programs, and the zone of the school, among other factors). Predictive models using the random forest algorithm were trained, and their performances were evaluated with F1-Macro and AUROC measures. The models were planned to be applied in different periods of the school year for the regular secondary school and for the technical secondary school ((before the beginning of the school year and after the first evaluation meeting for each grade). A total of eight predictive models were developed considering this temporal approach, and after an analysis of bias considering three protected attributes (gender, school zone, and social welfare program participation), seven of them were approved to be used for prediction. The models achieved outstanding performances according to the literature, with an AUROC higher than 0.90 and F1-Macro higher than 0.88. This paper describes in depth the characteristics of the data gathered, the specifics of data preprocessing, and the methodology followed for model generation and bias analysis, together with the architecture developed for the deployment of the predictive models. Among other findings, the results of the paper corroborate the importance given in the literature of using the previous performances of the students in order to predict their future performances.

The effects of multiple welfare program participatifon on educational expenditures and time use: Evidence from the social safety net in China

ObjectiveThis study examined the effects of participation in multiple social safety net programs (in particular, Dibao and an education subsidy) on the educational expenditures and educational time use of middle school students in China. BackgroundChina’s social safety net is a comprehensive system consisting of means-tested cash transfer and supplementary assistance programs. This study offers insights into how multiple welfare program participation contributes to children’s educational development. MethodsUsing nationally representative data from the China Education Panel Survey, we adopted propensity score matching and adjusted regression methods to examine the effects of receiving only Dibao, only an education subsidy, and both programs relative to comparable nonwelfare recipients. ResultsOur results indicated that the combination of Dibao and an education subsidy reduced recipient families’ school expenditures. However, Dibao and an education subsidy did not have significant effects on out-of-school expenditures and children’s total time spent on educational activities. ConclusionThe combination of Dibao and education subsidy programs is an effective policy instrument to relieve the financial burden of school expenditures for low-income families, yet the effectiveness varies for relatively disadvantaged and advantaged children. Moreover, current social safety net programs in China may not be sufficient for increasing the time children devote to educational activities.

Analysis of social welfare program and married women labor participation in West Sumatra

Social welfare program from the government has a role in reducing poverty rates and improving the welfare of poor households. Through social assistance, it can increase household income and indirectly alleviate the need for women to work. This study aims to analyze the effect of government social assistance on the probability of married women participating in the labor market. This study uses secondary data from the National Socio-Economic Survey (SUSENAS) in 2019 in West Sumatra. Using the logit model, the results of this study show that married women who are receiving social assistance have a greater opportunity to participate in the labor market.

Marginalization or Incorporation? Welfare Receipt and Political Participation among Young Adults

Abstract Prior scholarship finds that participation in means-tested welfare programs, including cash assistance and food stamps, deters political participation among groups that are already politically and socioeconomically marginalized. We revisit these findings within a contemporary context using nationally representative data, along with fixed-effects models that adjust for time-stable unobserved and time-varying observed characteristics. In contrast to prior research, we find little evidence that cash assistance is related to participation. However, food stamps—a benefits program that has undergone substantial changes in recent years—is positively associated with being registered to vote. Moreover, food stamps has countervailing associations with voting—e.g., marginalizing and incorporating—that depend on a person’s attention to politics. Together, these findings revise our understanding of how welfare influences political inequalities and advances policy feedback scholarship by identifying heterogeneity by political attentiveness as a focus of future inquiry.

Social Welfare Programs and Trust: Evidence from Six Latin American Cities

Abstract Using individual-level data that are representative at the city level for six Latin American capital cities (Bogota, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lima, Montevideo, and San José), we find that participation in government social welfare programs is negatively associated to trust, a result that is robust to the inclusion of individual risk measures and a broad array of controls. Our findings support the notion that low take-up rates may be linked to stigma and not to high transaction costs as commonly suggested (JEL D01, O12, O10).

Welfare Policy and the Construction of Legitimate Authority: The Case of Puerto Rico

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the role of the welfare state in maintaining state authority by testing the relationship between participation in state social programs and the espousal of ideals that reject the sovereignty of the existing state. We use the case of Puerto Rico, drawing on surveys of residents of Puerto Rico regarding their participation in social welfare programs and their views on the legitimacy of the U.S. state, distinguishing between means-tested and universal social programs. The research demonstrates that the form and extent of social citizenship programs affect the continued acceptance of authority of the U.S. federal government over the island’s territory and population. Specifically, the use of means-tested social benefits predicts a greater acceptance of the authority of the sovereign state. These findings may be considered broadly informative to the power of social welfare programs in garnering quiescence among minority populations, expanding the existing literature to illustrate differences in opinion of state legitimacy based on the type of social benefits one receives.

Do migrants have a mortality advantage?

Do migrants have a mortality advantage?

Concurrent Participation in Federally-Funded Welfare Programs and Empowerment Toward Economic Self-Sufficiency

This research examined the impact of participation in federal means-tested welfare programs on the attainment and maintenance of economic self-sufficiency. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), this quasi-experimental investigation compartmentalized 4216 low-income households into an intervention group (n = 2436) and a comparison group (n = 1780). Households in the intervention group received one or more welfare benefits for the most part of the 2008–2013 quinquennium. By contrast, those in the comparison group – although eligible for these benefits – did not receive them. The survey respondents were measured repeatedly over a 56-month period to assess whether welfare receipt impacts their household income steadily beyond 150% of the federal poverty level, after controlling for known predictors. Multivariate analyses displayed medium effect sizes indicating that participation in public assistance did decrease the likelihood of economic self-sufficiency. Macro-implications of these findings for poverty and social welfare stakeholders were discussed.

Welfare participation and depression among youth in the United States: A systematic review

Welfare programs play important roles in the lives of vulnerable populations. However, since their inception, welfare programs have been accompanied by contentious debate about their impact on the wellbeing of participants and, hence, about their collective value as a strategy for alleviating poverty. This study uses welfare participation as a marker of lower socioeconomic status to identify and synthesize the relationship between welfare participation and depression among youth. A systematic review was undertaken based on literature published between 1997 and 2017 through a search of 9 electronic databases, 15 reports met criteria for study inclusion. Four descriptive studies reported mixed findings. Of the 11 comparison studies, 10 studies showed consistent findings that participation in welfare programs was associated with a higher vulnerability for depression. Discussion includes the effects of stigma related to welfare and mental health treatment, and the implications for policy makers, social workers, and future research.

2262 Is less more? Examining the relationship between food assistance generosity and childhood obesity

2262 Is less more? Examining the relationship between food assistance generosity and childhood obesity

Very Low Food Security in US Households Is Predicted by Complex Patterns of Health, Economics, and Service Participation

Background: Very low food security (VLFS) happens at the intersection of nuanced and complex patterns of risk characteristics across multiple domains. Little is known about the idiosyncratic situations that lead households to experience VLFS.Objective: We used classification and regression tree (CART) analysis, which can handle complex combinations of predictors, to identify patterns of characteristics that distinguish VLFS households in the United States from other households.Methods: Data came from 3 surveys, the 2011-2014 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), the 2005-2012 NHANES, and the 2002-2012 Current Population Survey (CPS), with sample participants aged ≥18 y and households with income <300% of the federal poverty line. Survey participants were stratified into households with children, adult-only households, and older-adult households (NHIS, CPS) or individuals aged 18-64 y and individuals aged ≥65 y (NHANES). Household food security was measured with the use of the 10-item US Adult Food Security Scale. Variables from multiple domains, including sociodemographic characteristics, health, health care, and participation in social welfare and food assistance programs, were considered as predictors. The 3 data sources were analyzed separately with the use of CART analysis.Results: Household experiences of VLFS were associated with different predictors for different types of households and often occurred at the intersection of multiple characteristics spanning unmet medical needs, poor health, disability, limitation, depressive symptoms, low income, and food assistance program participation. These predictors built complex trees with various combinations in different types of households.Conclusions: This study showed that multiple characteristics across multiple domains distinguished VLFS households. Flexible and nonlinear methods focusing on a wide range of risk characteristics should be used to identify VLFS households and to inform policies and programs that can address VLFS households' various needs.

Linking Federal Surveys with Administrative Data to Improve Research on Families

Linkage of federal, state, and local administrative records to survey data holds great promise for research on families, in particular research on low-income families. Researchers can use administrative records in conjunction with survey data to better measure family relationships and to capture the experiences of individuals and family members across multiple points in time and social and economic domains. Administrative data can be used to evaluate program participation in government social welfare programs, as well as to evaluate the accuracy of reporting on receipt of such benefits. Administrative records can also be used to enhance collection and accuracy of survey and census data and to improve coverage of hard-to-reach populations. This article discusses potential uses of linked administrative and survey data, gives an overview of the linking methodology and infrastructure (including limitations), and reviews social science literature that has used this method to date.

What are the Effects of Doubling Up on Retirement Income and Assets?

The Great Recession has amplified the increase in socioeconomic instability and inequality in the United States. While much work has been conducted on retirement income and assets, not much work has been undertaken on seniors moving in with their adult children and grandchildren, possibly to save on housing costs. Utilizing Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) 1996, 2001, 2004, and 2008 data for seniors 65 and older, we conducted descriptive statistics and three types of models. First, we used discrete-time event history modeling to analyze the effect of changes in retirement income, assets, debt, and social welfare program participation between the current and previous interview on the propensity of moving into a multigenerational household, controlling for other factors. Then, we used logistic and linear regression to understand the effect of living in a multigenerational household on changes in seniors’ retirement income, assets, debt, and program participation, controlling for other factors. We also expanded our analyses to control for household type, i.e., a senior moving in with their adult children or grandchildren or vice versa, and for time, i.e., whether the recession impacts our results.The paper found that:- Experiencing economic distress increased the odds that a senior would move into a multigenerational household over the previous year or previous four months.- Seniors living in multigenerational households were more economically disadvantaged than seniors not living in multigenerational households.- Seniors living in multigenerational households were more likely to enroll in a social welfare program over the past four months than seniors not living in multigenerational households.- The relationships between seniors’ multigenerational household formation and economic outcomes did not change much during the recession. The policy implications of the findings are:- Living in a multigenerational household may have a potentially destabilizing effect on seniors’ economic well-being.- Policymakers may want to target financial education and counseling to seniors living in multigenerational households.

Welfare Programme Participation and the Wellbeing of Non-local Rural Migrants in Metropolitan China: A Social Exclusion Perspective

China has seen an unprecedented increase in rural-to-urban migrants in the last three decades, and the extension of welfare programmes to these migrants has been a public concern in urban society. The wellbeing of rural-to-urban migrants is closely associated with their access to various welfare programmes. Although pilot reforms on social insurance extension, which often require co-contribution from both employers and employees, have been implemented in several cities, the participation rate remains low. Participation in non-contributory welfare programmes is closely related to the hukou status, which is also undergoing reform. From a social exclusion perspective, this paper examines the critical issues in China’s welfare reforms in relation to the wellbeing of rural to urban migrants. Using qualitative data on welfare programme participation on both institutional and individual levels, this paper argues that the trends of welfare marketization and decentralization lead the welfare provision system to be more selective than universal. This welfare selectivity helps rural migrants with higher economic status become integrated into urban society and enjoy a sense of belonging in cities, while also creating a dual exclusion for rural migrant workers who are disadvantaged in the urban labour market. Individual-level factors, including employment selectivity, information obtainment, settlement intention, and confidence in future reform, influence the choice to participate in welfare programmes. This paper calls for an increased centralization in welfare system reforms.

WELFARE REFORM AND CHILDREN'S EARLY COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

1. INTRODUCTION In 1996, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) ended Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), replacing it with the new Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF differs from AFDC by ending the entitlement period of welfare via introduction of a time limit on welfare benefits and work requirement for participants. In this paper, we .analyze the impact of this welfare reform on the early cognitive development of welfare program participants' children using a multiperiod structural model. We first estimate the effects of mothers' work and welfare use on children's ability formation using a sample of single mothers and their children from the National Longitudinal- Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) Cohort. We then simulate different policy initiatives of the welfare reform to evaluate how each particular change impacts work and welfare participation behaviors of the mothers, and as a result, children's cognitive development. Early cognitive development has been found to be a strong predictor of long-term achievement and other outcomes such as educational attainment, crime involvement, salaries, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy (see reviews by Currie and Thomas 1995; Duncan and Brooks-Gunn 1997; Haveman and Wolfe 1995). Thus, it is crucial to understand whether, and by how much welfare program participation affects .children's cognitive outcomes. Moreover, any public policy initiative, such as PRWORA, that affects parents' incentives to work or participate in the welfare program by altering the opportunity .costs of parental time and financial inputs should be carefully evaluated. There is an abundance of studies on the effects of welfare reform on mothers' behaviors. However, implications of welfare reform on children's outcomes have not been studied by many. To our knowledge, other than this paper, there is only one other study. Miller and Zhang. (2009), that .analyzes the indirect effects of welfare reform on children's cognitive outcomes. Earlier studies generally find significantly negative relationships between welfare receipt and various types of child attainment measures. However, these negative relationships may not be causal due to improper comparison groups or the unobserved heterogeneity issue that is not addressed (Cunie 1998; Dahl .and Lochner 2012; Duncan, Magnuson, and Ludwig 2004). Chyi and Ozturk (2013) show that welfare program participation is not detrimental to early development of the children when the analysis is constrained to families who are most disadvantaged (and thus likely to be eligible for welfare benefits) and when unobserved heterogeneity is properly controlled for. We follow their lead and focus only on the attainment of children born to single mothers with 12 or fewer years of schooling. We model unobserved heterogeneity and use exogenous variations in welfare benefits across states and local labor market conditions to alleviate concerns of endogeneity. Moreover, we incorporate the dynamic nature of welfare program participation and employment decisions into our econometric setup. We estimate structural parameters of our model which enable us to run policy simulations with counterfactuals that imitate the changes brought upon by PRWORA. Thus, we not only provide insight on how welfare and employment affect the children's cognitive development, but .also document behavioral responses to the welfare reform and resulting impact on children's outcomes. Our estimates show that on average mother's work and welfare use both are beneficial for children's cognitive development. In our model, their effects are allowed to vary by children's ability endowment and they do; we find that benefits are highest for children with low endowment. Moreover, we allow the effects to vary by mother's attitudes toward welfare receipt and work and by her ability to utilize resources in child-rearing. We model unobserved heterogeneity in these dimensions and identify two types of mothers: mothers who are not likely to use welfare but are very efficient at using welfare resources if they do (Type I) and mothers who are very likely to use welfare but are not efficient at utilizing welfare resources (Type II). …