Aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) began with the Social Security Act, passed 50 years ago to provide what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a “safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this manmade world of ours. ” In creating the program, originally called aid to dependent children, the .Federal Government for the first time accepted responsibility fo...

This article reports the results of a survey of State Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rules regarding the treatment of unrelated cohabitors in households containing AFDC units. We examine State treatment of cash and in-kind contributions by cohabitors and find that the AFDC grant is usually not affected in the cohabitor makes in-kind contributions toward food and shelter expenses...

A large body of empirical research has concluded that, at least during the 1950s and 1960s, the effect of welfare benefits on migration differed significantly by racial group, with blacks being attracted by and whites repulsed by areas that provided high welfare benefits. This study revisits the issue of racial differences in attractiveness to interregional differences in welfare benefits, usin...

Recently the Social Security Administration was given responsibility for the administration of the aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) program. The major source of national data describing AFDC recipients is a series of studies of the families that receive payments under the program. Eleven such studies have been conducted on an intermittent basis since the program began in 1936. The...

In this chapter, we describe several aspects of the labor market performance of a sample of fathers of children whose mothers participate in Wisconsin Works (W-2). We track labor market outcomes for these fathers during calendar years 1998 and 1999, after the AFDC program was replaced by the W-2 program. Welfare reform in this period had direct and dramatic consequences for resident parents on ...

Because person-level data are not currently available at the Federal level, many questions regarding the use and expenditures of Medicaid services remain unanswered. This article demonstrates the capability of State Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) to provide data that can address a variety of Medicaid program issues at both the State and Federal levels. Using data from the Tennes...

Parents and teachers worldwide believe that a visual environment rich with print can contribute to young children's literacy. Children seem to recognize words in familiar logos at an early age. However, most of previous studies were carried out with alphabetic scripts. Alphabetic letters regularly correspond to phonological segments in a word and provide strong cues about the identity of the wh...

Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pool...

What is the effect of the AFDC-Unemployed Parent (UP) program on two-parent families? This question has become particularly relevant following the passage of the Family Support Act (FSA) of 1988, effective October 1990, which extended the previously state-optional AFDC-Unemployed Parent program to all states. This study clarifies what is meant by "two-parent" family in the federal legislation a...

We document a negative association between nonmarital childbearing and the subsequent likelihood of first marriage in the United States, controlling for a variety of potentially confounding influences. Nonmarital childbearing does not appear to be driven by low expectations of future marriage. Rather, it tends to be an unexpected and unwanted event, whose effects on a woman's subsequent likelih...