Most welfare-to-work programs designed to help single mothers leave welfare for employment focus on the challenge of finding a job. This article looks beyond the point of employment to consider the difficulty many former welfare recipients have keeping their jobs. The authors review evidence showing that many families cycle back and forth between welfare and work, losing jobs and returning to p...

Gift giving is thought to decrease welfare. Recipients are sometimes stuck with gifts they would not have purchased because the giver does not perfectly know the recipient’s preferences and in-kind gifts cannot be costlessly refunded. Such gifts are welfare reducing compared to giving cash if, in addition, recipients possess full information as to which stores carry their desired goods and the ...

Some public policies aimed at integrating welfare recipients into the world of work are predicated on the premise that getting welfare recipients to work will change their beliefs about how they will be treated in the labor market. This paper explores the rationale for these policies and concludes that a plausible argument can be made on the basis of concepts developed by social psychologists a...

Welfare caseloads have declined dramatically since 1996, assisted in part by a strong economy. However, many families have not made the transition to stable employment. As welfare reform reauthorization approaches, there has been an increasing discussion about welfare recipients who experience a variety of personal barriers to employment, or what have been characterized as hard-to-employ (HtE) ...

Evidence suggests that our foraging ancestors engaged in the small-scale equivalent of social insurance as an essential tool of survival and evolved a sophisticated psychology of social exchange (involving the social emotions of compassion and anger) to regulate mutual assistance. Here, we hypothesize that political support for modern welfare policies are shaped by these evolved mental programs...

Welfare recipients in Germany are allowed to take up supplementary jobs while receiving welfare. The possibility of having a job was introduced reduce welfare dependency and facilitate successful labor market integration. In the present study, we use German Panel Study Labour Market Social Security (PASS) for years 2006-2014 analyze impact on chances exit. Dynamic multinomial logit models contr...

This article examines the prevalence of potential barriers to employment using data from a longitudinal study of 1,075 Milwaukee County parents who applied for assistance from Wisconsin’s TANF program in 1999. It also examines whether those potential barriers were related to their subsequent employment and earnings. We find that many of these TANF applicants faced significant and often multiple...

Abstract Politicians engage in, and the media amplifies, social constructions of welfare recipients as undeserving. Such messaging seeks to influence mass public opinion, but what are effects on target population receiving benefits? We test if deservingness affects recipients' mental health. To do so, we exploit a quasi-experiment entailing dramatic shift in after recipient Denmark became subje...

The study of community attitudes toward welfare and welfare recipients is an area of increasing interest. This is not only because negative attitudes can lead to stigmatization and discrimination, but because of the relevance of social attitudes to policy decisions. We quantify the attitudes toward welfare in the Australian population using attitude data from a nationally representative survey ...