Welfare Policy Research

Many policymakers, particularly those at the state level, are faced with a task that presents a variety of opportunities and challenges: how to design new welfare programs. Yet many of the issues being confronted are not new. For over three decades, we have been helping state and federal officials get the information they need to make sound decisions about welfare and other publicly funded programs. We continue to be in the forefront of evaluating welfare issues and modeling the impacts of welfare reform.

Evaluating Welfare Reform Programs

Mathematica has helped federal and state agencies plan, design, and conduct welfare reform evaluations, including our wide-ranging study of Work First New Jersey. These evaluations have focused on issues that range from how to collect information efficiently to how to measure impacts on participants.

Strengthening Families

Recent debates about TANF have centered on strengthening low-income families by supporting healthy marriage and relationships, increasing father involvement and support, encouraging abstinence for teens, and providing safe environments for vulnerable teen mothers. Mathematica's studies are informing these sensitive yet important debates.

Moving from Welfare to Work

Welfare recipients can face daunting obstacles in moving from the welfare rolls to private-sector payrolls, and Mathematica has studied virtually all of them. We have evaluated programs that prepare welfare recipients by providing education, skills training, and help finding a job, including an innovative program in Ramsey County, Minnesota that works with families facing time limits. To provide insight into the challenges TANF agencies face in working with recipients who have not found jobs, we developed a common survey instrument that can be used across states to examine barriers to employment and self-sufficiency. We have also looked at the needs of the hard to serve as well as the role of counseling and support, including child care, mental health services, and transportation assistance. Other areas of study include the link between health insurance and welfare dependence, as well as intergenerational effects on children. Our national evaluation of the welfare-to-work grants program and rural welfare-to-work study are providing important evidence for policymakers.

Getting and Keeping A Job

Since many former welfare recipients lose their first job, we have looked at special programs designed to help them find new jobs quickly. We have also documented strategies for helping them keep their jobs.

Probing Long-Term Welfare Dependency

Perhaps the hardest population to move off the welfare rolls is older recipients who began collecting benefits at an early age. Furthermore, their payments are a large proportion of the welfare dollars spent. We have studied cost-effective and practical ways to reduce their welfare dependency.

Analyzing Program Participation

Most participants in the safety net receive benefits from more than one program. We have studied participation in multiple programs, such as TANF, food stamps, and Medicaid. We have also looked at the timing of exits from different programs as self-sufficiency develops.

Projecting Costs and Caseloads

We can project the costs of changes in welfare and food stamp benefit rules quickly, using sophisticated computer models that we pioneered more than two decades ago and continue to refine. These powerful tools can be used to look at the impact of a wide variety of reforms. They can also predict how reforms will change welfare recipients' behavior. To maximize the models' usefulness, we continually update the database.

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