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Welfare programs often attempt to reduce their welfare rolls by pushing recipients into immediate employment, while others provide education and training to people before expecting them to re-enter the job market. In some states, such as California, counties are allowed flexibility in the implementation of welfare programs. This allows the counties to choose to focus on immediate job placement, educating recipients, or a combination of the two. This study examines three different implementation strategies of California's Greater Avenues for Independence Program (GAIN) in order to determine if the county which focused heavily on educating GAIN participants was most successful in reducing its welfare roll. / Master of Arts

As the number of Indigenous children and youth in the care of Manitoba child welfare steadily increases, so do the questions and public debates. The loss of children from Indigenous communities due to residential schools and later on, to child welfare, has been occurring for well over a century and Indigenous people have been continuously grieving and protesting this forced removal of their children. In 1999, when the Manitoba government announced their intention to work with Indigenous peoples to expand off-reserve child welfare jurisdiction for First Nations, establish a provincial Métis mandate and restructure the existing child care system through legislative and other changes, Indigenous people across the province celebrated it as an opportunity for meaningful change for families and communities. The restructuring was to be accomplished through the Aboriginal Justice Initiative-Child Welfare Initiative (AJI-CWI). Undoubtedly, more than a decade later, many changes have been made to the child welfare system but children are still been taken into care at even higher rates than before the changes brought about by the AJI-CWI. In order to develop an understanding of what has occurred as a result of the AJI-CWI process, this study reached out to child welfare workers who had worked in the system before, during and after the process was put in place. Using a storytelling approach based in an Indigenous methodology, twenty-seven child welfare workers shared how they perceived the benefits, the deficits, the need for improvement and how they observed the role of Indigenous culture within the child welfare context. The stories provide a unique insight into how the changes were implemented and how the storytellers experienced the process, as well as their insights into barriers, disappointments, benefits and recommendations for systemic change. / Graduate

<p>Inom omsorgsyrket styrs arbertsinsatserna utav lagar. Syftet var att se i en enkätundersökning om det förelåg någon skillnad i arbetstillfredsställelse mellan personal som arbetar under LSS (Lagen om stöd och service till vissa funktionshindrade) respektive personal under SoL (Socialtjänstlagen) samt att belysa vilka faktorer som påverkade personalens intentinoer att byta arbete. Studiens kvalitativa del syftade till att genom intervjuer visa hur cheferna uppfattar personalens arbetssituation. En hypotes var att personal under LSS upplever högre arbetstillfredsställelse än personal under SoL då LSS är en mer förmånlig lag. Studien utfördes på 84 omsorgsarbetare och tre chefer i en mindre kommun. Resultatet visade ingen egentlig avvikelse i arbetstilfredsställelse mellan lagarna men att organisationskultur är den starkaste prediktorn för intention att byta arbete.</p>

This thesis is concerned with rights-based justifications for redistribution. Orthodox views are critically examined in three of the chapters. The case against fundamental moral rights to welfare, not derived from other more fundamental moral rights or principles, is pressed in chapter three. Chapter five distinguishes between rights-based and equality-based justifications for redistribution and argues that Ronald Dworkin's idea of a right to equal respect and concern is best understood as an equality-based justification. The enabling model of rights and deprivation is introduced in chapter six. This model says that liberty rights require that others ensure that the right-holder enjoys the means to do what he or she has the right to do as well as not interfere with him or her doing what he or she has the right to do. It is found to break down because it is unable to accommodate the right to do wrong. The other four chapters are concerned with defending an alternative model of rights and deprivation. The groundwork for this alternative model - the development model of rights and deprivation - is laid in chapters two and four. Chapter two presents a person-affecting theory of rights. The two principal conclusions of the development model of rights and deprivation are defended in chapter seven. It is argued, first, that from both of the abstract moral rights to liberty introduced in chapter four flow certain derivative rights against others to have one's needs met and, second, that the state is required to promote and protect particular forms of culture as well as to meet certain sorts of personal needs including special needs, collective needs, and the unmet personal needs that arise when the prevailing methods of meeting those needs breaks down. The final chapter discusses two general issues relating to the development model of rights and deprivation.

This dissertation is a collection of three essays on price and welfare. The first chapter investigates the optimal price index for central banks to stabilize in a model economy where volatile prices are harmful to welfare through monetary friction. The second chapter estimates the impact of recent technological innovation, namely the internet, on the dynamics of prices and welfare through a variety of real mechanisms. The third chapter analyzes the impact of financial regulation on the prices of financial assets and the welfare of the financial market participants. There is currently a debate about what price index central banks should target when economies are open and exposed to international price shocks. Chapter 1 derives the optimal price index by solving the Ramsey problem in a New Keynesian small open economy model with an arbitrary number of sectors. This approach improves on existing theoretical benchmarks because (1) it makes an explicit distinction between the consumer price index (CPI) and the producer price index (PPI), and (2) it allows exogenous international price shocks to play a role. Qualitatively, I use the analytical expression of the optimal price index to discuss that popular indices, such as the PPI and the core/headline CPI, are suboptimal because they ignore the heterogeneity in price stickiness and the effect of inflation on the trade surplus. Quantitatively, I calibrate a 35-sector version of the model for 40 countries and show that stabilizing the optimal price index yields significantly higher welfare than alternative indices. In Chapter 2, which is joint work with Yoon J. Jo and David Weinstein, we estimate the impact of e-commerce on Japanese prices and welfare. First, we consider the possibility that e-commerce may have lowered prices by driving down the average prices of goods available online. Second, we compute the welfare gains due to the ability of e-commerce to enable consumers to purchase goods from other regions. Third, we compute the gains that arise through e-commerce's ability to arbitrage intercity price differences. We find that all three channels produced welfare gains in Japan, but our estimates suggest that the first and second channels are by far the most important, with welfare gains through these channels being eleven to sixteen times larger than through the price arbitrage channel. Overall, we find that increased inter-city arbitrage raised Japanese welfare by 0.12 percent, the gains due to new varieties available through online shopping raised welfare 0.7 percent, and the gains due to overall price reductions for goods available online raised welfare by 1 percent. In Chapter 3, which is joint work with Sakai Ando, we analyze the impact of dealer regulation on price quality (informativeness and volatility) and its implications for the welfare of market participants. We argue that although price informativeness, volatility, and the dealer's profitability all deteriorate, against conventional wisdom, other market participants are better off due to the dealer's risk-shifting motive. A static model is used to clarify the main intuition, and the robustness of the welfare results, as well as the fragility of the conventional wisdom about price quality, are discussed by incorporating dynamics and endogenizing information acquisition.