The Institute for Research on Poverty at University of Wisconsin-Madison held a welfare reform conference in March 1997. Both the summary and full proceedings of the conference are available. Note that the summary is available in Focus. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was passed on August 22, 1996. The Act "changed the nation's welfare system into one...

The Manpower Research Demonstration Corporation (MRDC) issued this report last month detailing the experiences of working mothers who were formerly on welfare. The report is drawn from survey data and ethnographic interviews collected by the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, which studied welfare reform in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia. Among the more distressing findings, ...

Written by Paul Offner and Harry Holzer, Professors at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, "Left Behind in the Labor Market: Recent Employment Trends Among Young Black Men" is a nine page report that compares the employment trends of young black men with no more than a high school education to other groups of the same educational background over the past two decades. According to the report,...

In this recent paper from the Institute for Poverty Research's Working Papers series, Howard Chernick and Cordelia Reimers examine the Current Population Survey in 1994-1995 and 1997-1999 to see if there was a discernible drop in households receiving public assistance in New York City. While they found that the proportion of households receiving at least one public assistance benefit remained the...