Publications
Vouchers and Social Services
 "Using Vouchers to Deliver Social Services: Considerations Based on the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Program Experiences." Gretchen Kirby and Andrew Burwick, November 2007. Vouchers are one strategy for delivering public services in a way that makes the consumer the central figure in deciding when and where to receive services. Vouchers also present a unique opportunity to expand the role of faith- and community-based organizations in the network of publicly funded services. This report examines how vouchers were used in the CCDF and TANF programs and the degree to which this funding mechanism supports the goals of maximizing client choice and expanding the service delivery network to include faith- and community-based organizations. The report notes that vouchers are used to subsidize the consumer-demand services of child care and training for TANF recipients, but TANF program administrators have not considered using them for other services. In addition, CCDF and TANF administrators do not seem to consider vouchers as a specific means of expanding the role of faith- and community-based organizations in the service delivery network.
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Food Stamp Trends
 "Dynamics of Food Stamp Program Participation, 2001-2003." Scott Cody, Laura Castner, James Mabli, and Julie Sykes, November 2007. The Food Stamp Program provides assistance to millions of families each month. This report examines how long families tend to receive food stamps, and what circumstances lead them to enter and exit the program. About half the families that begin receiving benefits participate for eight months or less. Changes in earnings help explain why individuals enter (and subsequently exit) the program. More than half of the families that entered the program between 2001 and 2003 did so after a drop in monthly earnings; three-quarters of the families that left the program over this period did so when their total monthly income increased by more than 10 percent. The data source was the 2001 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative, short-term longitudinal survey that collects detailed information on monthly labor force activity, earned and unearned income, cash and noncash assistance, and family and household composition.
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Disability and Well-Being
 "Material Hardship, Poverty, and Disability Among Working-Age Adults." Peiyun She and Gina A. Livermore, Social Science Quarterly, December 2007. The authors used data from the 1996 panel of SIPP to examine the extent to which working-age people with disabilities experience several types of material hardships. The findings indicate that disability is an important determinant of material hardship, even after controlling for income and other sociodemographic characteristics. In addition, a large majority of the low-income respondents who reported a material hardship also reported being limited for some period of time in the amount or kind of work they can perform. The findings provide support for policies that account for disability-related expenditures and needs when determining eligibility for means-tested assistance programs. They also suggest that the official poverty measure overstates the relative economic well-being of people with disabilities.
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Afterschool Issues
 "When Schools Stay Open Late: Results from the National Evaluation of the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program." Susanne James-Burdumy, Mark Dynarski, and John Deke, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, December 2007. This article presents evidence from the elementary school component of Mathematica’s national evaluation of the 21st Century Community Learning Center afterschool programs. The findings indicate that the programs affected the supervision students received after school, with parents less likely to care for their child and other adults more likely, but there was no statistically significant effect on the incidence of self-care. Students in the program reported feeling safer after school, but their academic outcomes were not affected, and they had more incidents of negative behavior. The elementary study was conducted in 12 school districts and 26 afterschool centers.
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Does Ticket to Work Work?
 A special issue of the Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation (volume 27, number 2, 2007), titled "Ticket to Success? Early Findings from the Ticket to Work Evaluation," summarizes the early implementation experiences and impacts of the Ticket to Work (TTW) program. The program, together with other initiatives created by the Ticket to Work and Work Incentives Improvement Act, attempts to develop a new employment services marketplace to increase the level and mix of employment support services for people who receive disability benefit payments from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Rather than setting up a single training program, TTW includes payment mechanisms designed to induce employment-service providers to increase the supply of programs and the range of approaches. Six papers in the special issue, edited by Craig Thornton, Robert Weathers, and David Wittenburg, provide an early picture of both the potential for the TTW program and the challenges involved with reaching this potential. See more.
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Ann Arbor Office Opens
 We are proud to announce the opening of our office in Ann Arbor, Michigan, this month. Headed by senior fellow Catherine McLaughlin, this new endeavor enhances Mathematica's breadth and capacity to develop multidisciplinary, integrated, and rigorous solutions to some of today's most pressing social issues. Contact the new office at 555 S. Forest Ave., Suite 3, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2583, (734) 794-1120. Read the release.
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