Caroline Danielson

Did Welfare Reform Cause the Caseload Decline

The federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, created in 1996 to replace Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), devolved considerable policy‐making responsibility to states. In the 2006 reauthorization of TANF, Bush administration officials and others proclaimed welfare reform a dramatic success, yet research has not comprehensively assessed the extent to which specific welfare policies caused the caseload to decline. Employing 7 years of AFDC data and 9 years of TANF data, in combination with methods sensitive to the effect of gradually implemented policies on caseload stocks, this work obtains plausible estimates of the effects of the economy and of four policies (financial incentives, sanctions, time limits, and diversion) that characterize the shift from AFDC to TANF. Simulations imply that the examined policies pushed the caseload down in the 1990s but that neither they nor the economy can explain the majority of the decline.

Asset and reporting policies in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Over the past decade and a half legislative and regulatory changes at the federal level have given US states additional authority to design their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP). This devolution of policymaking authority has led to considerable ambiguity at the national level about the policies that states have put in place. Drawing on a new survey of state SNAP administrators, this paper characterizes two key areas of policy devolution: the treatment of household assets in eligibility determinations and participants’ paperwork burden. We find asset and reporting policy changes to be widespread, and the states that have made changes most often adopt the most expansive policy change allowed. We also demonstrate that more accurate policy data sharpens the inferences we make about the effects of several of these policies on participation in SNAP.

Can the Economy Explain the Explosion in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Caseload? An Assessment of the Local-level Approach

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has grown rapidly in recent years—by about 50% in the seven years between 2000 and 2007, and by another 70% in the four years between 2007 and 2011—such that in 2011, SNAP served 14% of the U.S. population. Contributing to our understanding of the causes of this very rapid increase in the caseload, this article extends the time period of analysis through and past the official end of the Great Recession, analyzes more geographically disaggregated caseloads and the impact of substate economic conditions, and considers the impact of recent major, state-level SNAP policy changes. In models that exploit substate-level data, we find consistent evidence of significant impacts of both the substate level and statewide economy on local area SNAP caseloads. Surprisingly, while one might have expected more geographically disaggregated data to improve the alignment of the measurement with the concept of interest (i.e., the labor market opportunities of an individual), and therefore lead to larger estimates of the impact of the economy, in fact estimates fall—perhaps due to measurement error. We find at best mixed evidence of policy impacts. Simulations indicate that the economy can account for most of the 2007 to 2011 increase in the caseload, although relatively less of the 2000 to 2007 increase. Nonetheless, the role of the economy in driving caseloads appears to be substantial in both periods.