Since welfare reform, impoverished children in single-parent families receive less aid than under the previous system and the most disadvantaged of these children have slipped deeper into poverty. This Research-in-Brief summarizes a study that explores the economic well-being of children in low-income single-parent families since the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportun...

WITH the passage of the welfare reform law of 1996, 60 years of federal welfare policy was abruptly reversed. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) ended the legal entitlement to benefits, mandated that a large percentage of recipients work, and imposed a five-year time limit on the receipt of federally funded benefits. Since then, welfare caseloads have fallen sharply, and...

The definition of sustainable development is often taken from the so-called “Brundtland” report, requiring that activities of the current generation not detract from the potential welfare of future generations. Mining is often held up as unsustainable in this regard since the extracted resource is non-renewable. Yet Brundtland’s definition of sustainable development also requires that the curre...

Finland introduced a personal identification number system in 1964, and since then practically all administrative registers have included this unique identification code. Currently Finland has strict data protection laws, which prohibit the collection of sensitive health and social information. Health data that includes identifiers can be gathered by obtaining informed consent from the patients...

Underpinned by the assumption that unemployed persons are passive recipients of social security, recent welfare reforms have increased benefit conditionality in the UK and introduced harsher penalties for failure to meet these conditions. Yet, conditionality may result in vulnerable groups disproportionately experiencing disentitlement from benefits, one of the rights of social citizenship, bec...

This study reports on 20 years of private social welfare spending, from 1972 through 199 1. The private sector is playing an increasingly important role in financing the Nation's aggregate social welfare programs; this section assumes a large share of health and medical care expenditures, as well as income-maintenance benefits, the latter in areas of employment-related pensions, group life insu...

Several ``Paretian'' welfare rules are equivalent when policymakers know agents' characteristics, e.g., a policy is optimal if (a) any other policy making someone better o ̈ harms some agent, or (b) it is the maximum of some social welfare function. This paper extends these and other rules to environments where policymakers have a probability distribution over a state space of possible models. U...

The idea of performance contracting or performance based contracting has become increasingly popular in the child welfare arena. This isn’t surprising, in that it comes on the heels of two very powerful shifts in the provision of child welfare services since the early 1990s: a rapid growth in privatization and the emergence of major accountability efforts from the federal government in the form...

This article takes both a short-term and a long-term look at trends in social welfare expenditures under public programs. For fiscal year 1975, inflation and the recession were the key to developments. Inflation ate up more than half the 20 percent ($47 billion increase--the largest in the history of the series--partly as the result of antirecession measures. After adjustment for population and...

In many economic settings, like spectrum and real-estate auctions, geometric figures on the plane are for sale. Each bidder bids for his desired figure, and the auctioneer has to choose a set of disjoint figures that maximizes the social welfare. In this work, we design mechanisms that are both incentive compatible and computationally feasible for these environments. Since the underlying algori...