IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wop/jopovw/78.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

What Goes Up Must Come Down? Explaining Recent Changes in Public Assistance Caseloads

Author

Listed:
  • Rebecca M. Blank

Abstract

Over the past decade, public assistance caseloads have increased rapidly to an historical high point and then decreased with even greater speed to their lowest level in decades. Several recent papers have focused on the rise in Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) caseloads in the early 1990s and the turn-around in the mid-1990s. This research indicates that both macroeconomic factors and program factors appear to be important for these changes. A key question is whether these recent declines are permanent, and how much they might turn around in a more sluggish economy. This paper focuses on the relationship between recent caseload changes and the overall economy, comparing estimates from a wide variety of models using both annual and monthly data. By using monthly data, which is available through late 1998, this paper also presents several rough estimates of the impact of welfare reform post-1996. The Food Stamp program has also experienced major program changes, although it has remained relatively unchanged for single mothers and their children who once participated in AFDC. This paper also provides a detailed comparative analysis of AFDC/TANF caseload changes with Food Stamp caseload changes.

Suggested Citation

  • Rebecca M. Blank, 1999. "What Goes Up Must Come Down? Explaining Recent Changes in Public Assistance Caseloads," JCPR Working Papers 78, Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.
  • Handle: RePEc:wop:jopovw:78
    Note: This paper is not available for download
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wop:jopovw:78. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/jcuchus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.