The state of Virginia has been a leader in the design and implementation of welfare reform measures. State welfare reforms were enacted in 1996 and federal reforms followed shortly after in 1996. Initial decreases in program caseloads and the movement of former recipients from unemployment to employment have led initial reform measures to be widely heralded as successes. Significant concerns remain, however, about the ability of non-metropolitan labor markets to absorb female household heads currently on welfare. This thesis addresses potential differences in the impact of welfare reform measures in non-metropolitan and metropolitan labor markets by estimating wage and reservation wage equations for female household heads in Northern and Southwest Virginia. The results suggest young children and lack of access to automobiles create significantly greater barriers to employment in non-metropolitan than metropolitan labor markets. Estimated potential earnings in Southwest Virginia were lower than in Northern Virginia and suggest that female household heads will have trouble escaping poverty through employment. In fact, initial reported earnings for both areas have fallen below estimates of living wages needed to escape poverty. The results also suggest traditional labor market characteristics do not explain all of the differences in earnings, particularly the differences in the observed wages of persons exiting welfare as compared to the general population. If this is the case, policies that only address child care and transportation costs may have little impact as to the ability of welfare recipients to get and keep jobs that enable them to become economically self-sufficient. / Master of Science

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Thesis advisor: Marc K. Landy / In August of 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and fulfilled his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it.” Conventionally, the passage of welfare reform has been understood as a product of the ‘Republican Revolution,’ a backlash against government in which the party “took back” both chambers of Congress and discharged the ten provisions of the ‘Contract with America.’ This account treats welfare reform as a deeply political affair: President Clinton was thus put into the position of needing to pass conservative welfare reform. While this theory is not inaccurate, this senior honors thesis holds that it is incomplete. Therefore, any account of the passage of welfare reform needs to engage with the more complex dimensions of policy formation. I suggest that the PRWORA was signed into law by virtue of public opinion aligning with elite opinion. The latter required ‘dissensus politics’ to be overcome. I argue that this transpired, and further that a loose consensus was formed among the elites with respect to the contents of meaningful reform due to social science evidence emanating from the various states. Lastly, I contend that the ancillary features of the legislation were negotiated, for which the nation’s governors played an instrumental role. These matters reveal timeless truths about American politics and policy formation. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Political Science. / Thesis advisor:

This dissertation consists of three essays related to the effects of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation as well as effects on labor supply and childcare arrangements. States implemented welfare reform at different times from 1992 to 1996, and these policies notably introduced work requirements and other restrictions intended to limit dependency of needy families. One mechanism reforms were intended to address was childhood exposure to a "culture" of ongoing welfare receipt. In Essay 1, I estimate the effect of reform on the transmission of welfare participation for 2961 mother-daughter pairs in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) over the period 1968-2013. I find that a mother's welfare participation increased her daughter's odds of participation as an adult by roughly 30 percentage points, but that welfare reform attenuated this transmission by at least 50 percent, or at least 30 percent over the baseline odds of participation. While I find comparable-sized transmission patterns in daughters' adult use of the broader safety net and other outcomes such as educational attainment and income, there is no diminution of transmission after welfare reform. In Essay 2, I estimate behavioral labor supply responses to reforms using experimental data from Connecticut's Jobs First welfare waiver program in 1996. Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of Jobs First suggesting evidence that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. However, estimates obtained by a semi-parametric panel quantile estimator allowing women to vary arbitrarily in preferences and welfare participation costs indicate no evidence of behavioral-induced participation. These findings show that a welfare program imposes an estimated cost up to 10 percent of quarterly earnings, and these costs can be heterogeneous throughout the conditional earnings distribution. Lastly, in Essay 3, I return to PSID data to examine the relationship between welfare spending on childcare assistance and the care arrangements chosen by low-income families. Experimental evidence has shown that formal child care can result in long-term socioeconomic gains for disadvantaged children, and work requirements after welfare reform have necessitated increased demand for child care among single mothers. I find that an increase of a thousand dollars in state-level childcare assistance per child in poverty increases the probability of formal care among low-earnings single-mother families by about 27 to 30 percentage points. When public assistance makes child care more affordable, families within the target population reveal a higher preference for formal care relative to informal, which may be related to perceived quality improvements for child enrichment and development.

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) significantly affected many families by changing public assistance from an entitlement program to a work program for recipients and imposing a 60 month maximum period for receiving assistance. Unanticipated outcomes created deleterious results for many single parents. This multiple case study explored the experiences of four African American single mothers in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States receiving assistance regarding welfare reform, the welfare system and their perceptions of welfare advocacy. Black feminist and empowerment theories framed the study to examine how welfare policy changes affected African American women's families and their abilities to advocate. Data were collected from narrative interviews and artifacts provided by 4 participants and analyzed using thematic content analysis. The key findings demonstrate recipients who had no prior interest in Temporary Assistance to Needy Families advocacy found their voices when invited; offering insights about system challenges and successes as well as strategies for improvement This study will impact social change by informing policymakers, think-tank researchers, community program developers, and public assistance caseworkers for policy discussions regarding PRWORA. Women may also learn strategies for advocacy and organizing from the analysis.

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In response to the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and its lead cash assistance program Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), states have taken unique and divergent approaches to welfare policy implementation. One popular approach to workfare delivery, known as privatization, involves contracting with non-profit and for-profit entities operating within the private sector. The General Accounting Office reports that nearly every state is privatizing TANF services to some degree through third-party contracts, but very little is understood about why variation in contracting exists and the ramifications for the program outcomes of welfare recipients. This dissertation initially explores the possible factors that influence welfare privatization decisions. Ordinary least squares regression estimations suggest that contracting patterns are significantly associated with levels of fiscal capacity, urbanization, African American caseloads, and non-profit presence. Secondly, this dissertation examines the potential ramifications of privatization on the TANF program outputs and outcomes of individual welfare clients. After exploring state-level patterns in privatization and performance, I estimate multilevel models that simultaneously incorporate both individual-level and contextual-level variables providing the discipline with the clearest picture of how welfare clients are fairing under various administrative environments. The results of the multi-level analysis favor the null hypothesis as the majority of privatization coefficients are statistically insignificant, indicating minimal direct ownership effects on the quality of TANF outcomes. That being said, there is inconsistent yet persistent evidence emerging from both the state-level and multi-level analyses suggesting that non-profit welfare delivery induces superior TANF work participation rates and employment outcomes. Privatizing welfare provision is not a panacea in that TANF outcomes are seldom improved under profit-seeking or non-profit arrangements, but an unwavering commitment to social missions and assisting the poor could put non-profits in a relatively superior position to transform welfare recipients into self-sufficient, fully employed members of society.

本文探討俄羅斯的社會福利改革過程。透過說明俄羅斯社會福利制度改革模式的選擇，解釋影響改革的因素，具體描述了蘇聯解體以來的俄羅斯福利制度改革過程，特別是普丁政府的改革策略。討論主題為俄羅斯的福利制度改革模式為何？影響俄羅斯福利制度改革的因素有哪些？何以普丁政府得以克服阻礙推動福利制度改革？ 本文套用Esping-Andersen的分類法來分析俄羅斯的福利模式，發現俄羅斯福利制度轉型採用自由模式作為改革方法。至於普丁政府何以克服困難進行福利制度改革，本文從經濟、政治和國家治理三個角度分析之，發現國家治理能力的改善是普丁政府得以推動福利改革的重要原因。 / This study aims at exploring the process of social welfare reform in Russia. To fulfill this goal, the author describes the pattern and factors of reform during the Post-Soviet era with a specific focus on the Putin government's policy. The main subjects of the study are the pattern of reform, the factors contributing to reform, and the Putin government’s reform strategy. By applying Esping-Anderson’s classification of welfare reform to Russia, the author finds that the Russian government has taken a liberal approach to reform. The thesis analyzes Putin government's reform policy from three perspectives, economy, politics, and state governance, and concludes that the improvement of state governance plays the main role in advancing Russian social welfare reform.

Submitted by admin tede (tede@pucgoias.edu.br) on 2017-10-30T11:18:40Z No. of bitstreams: 1 FATIMA DOS REIS.pdf: 1101467 bytes, checksum: 94265f8144d6486a21b11cdd574ea68c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-10-30T11:18:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 FATIMA DOS REIS.pdf: 1101467 bytes, checksum: 94265f8144d6486a21b11cdd574ea68c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-06-28 / This research is dedicated to the study of State reformation in Brazil in the period from 1995 to 2002, carried out from strains on Country adaptation to contemporary capitalism dynamics. It has at aim to understand reorganization of public administration in Brazil inside logics of State Reformation implanted during the studied period. With basis on theoretical and empirical references, are discussed the actions concerned to process of Brazilian public administration reconfiguration and, therefore, of civil service as well as the resources limitations in the period, especially in the Universidade Federal de Goiás ((UFG) - Goias Federal University. The study discusses particularly the actions concerned to administration reform, to civil servants Social Welfare reformation and resources limitations policy to Higher Education federal institutions. First, this research is characterized by an accurate bibliographical revision about the theme, looking for making explicit the socioeconomic and political determinations on the basis of capitalist State reformation, as well as its theoretical references, to understand the economic and ideological foundations of the reforms carried out during that period. In a second moment, the study intended to make clear, by means of documental analysis, how the administration reform, the Social Welfare of civil servants reformation, and the resources limitation policy have reflected over UFG. The data allow to affirm that the implantation of the neoliberal reform of Brazilian State reflected in a significant way over the administration of UFG at the extent that both social Welfare of civil servants and administration reforms as well as the limitation of resources destined to the university have generated a shortage of servants and finances to face the existence of that institution while an important public service answerable for federal public higher education in the State of Goiás, Brazil. / A presente dissertação é voltada para o estudo da reforma do Estado no Brasil no período de 1995 a 2002, desencadeada a partir das pressões de organismos internacionais como Banco Mundial e Fundo Monetário Internacional- FMI, para a adaptação do país à dinâmica do capitalismo contemporâneo. Tem o objetivo de compreender o processo da reorganização da administração pública no Brasil na lógica da reforma do Estado implantada no período. Discute, com base em referências teóricas e empíricas, os reflexos das ações do processo de reconfiguração da administração pública brasileira e, por conseguinte, do serviço público, bem como do contingenciamento de recursos no período de 1995 a 2002, em especial na Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG). Discute, em especial, as ações atinentes à reforma administrativa, à reforma da previdência social do servidor público e ao contingenciamento de recursos para as instituições federais de ensino superior (IFES), no período de 1995 a 2002. A pesquisa caracteriza-se, primeiro, por uma revisão bibliográfica acurada sobre a temática buscando explicitar as determinações socioeconômicas e políticas que fundamentaram o processo de reforma do Estado capitalista, bem como seu referencial teórico, com a compreensão dos fundamentos econômico-ideológicos do processo das reformas realizadas no período estudado, com destaque ao processo de globalização. Em segundo, tenta evidenciar, por meio de análise documental, como a reforma administrativa, a reforma da previdência do setor público e o contingenciamento de recursos se expressaram na Universidade Federal de Goiás. Os dados permitem afirmar que a implantação da reforma neoliberal do Estado brasileiro refletiu-se de maneira significativa na administração da Universidade Federal de Goiás, na medida em que tanto a reforma da previdência dos servidores públicos e a reforma administrativa quanto o contingenciamento dos recursos financeiros a ela destinados geraram um déficit de pessoal e de recursos financeiros para fazer face à própria existência dessa instituição como importante serviço público responsável pelo ensino superior público federal no Estado de Goiás.