Selecting Social Indicators to Forecast Child Welfare Caseload

Child welfare worker caseload: what's just right?

This study was designed to establish a caseload standard for child welfare workers. Understanding reasonable workload expectations for child welfare workers is a cornerstone of quality service provision and the recruitment and retention of qualified workers. Because of the analytic complexity of this question, qualitative and quantitative methods were used.The mixed methods included focus group...

Do welfare benefits cause the welfare caseload?

Analyses of the welfare system generally examine one of five competing models: (1) The work disincentive model; (2) the human capital model; (3) the macroeconomic model; (4) the public choice model; or (5) the cost-of-job-loss model. This paper employs the Granger causality concept and the multiple-rank F statistic to test the implications of all five of these models simultaneously. The results...

Maryland’s Child-Only Caseload:

Welfare Reform and Food Stamp Caseload Dynamics

We use state-level panel data for federal fiscal years 1980–1998 to estimate the impacts of welfare reform and the business cycle on food stamp caseloads. The model we employ is a dynamic function of past caseloads, economic factors, AFDC and Food Stamp Program policies, political factors, AFDC caseload levels, and unobserved fixed and trending heterogeneity. Our results suggest that the robust...

AFDC, SSI, and Welfare Reform Aggressiveness: Caseload Reductions vs. Caseload Shifting∗

Welfare reform has made receipt of cash benefits more difficult and less attractive for single mothers. We examine whether reforms of AFDC affected caseloads of another program Supplemental Security Income (SSI). We exploit state variation in welfare reform over time, and find that female-headed households in states aggressively pursuing welfare reform were 21.6 percent more likely to receive S...