Policy analysts from nine industrialized nations trace common trends in the way social welfare programs are adapting to political and economic tensions.

Reform of welfare is one of the nation's most contentious issues, with debate often driven more by politics than by facts and careful analysis. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition identifies the key policy questions for measuring whether our changing social welfare programs are working, reviews the available studies and research, and recommends the most effective ways to answer those questions. This book discusses the development of welfare policy, including the landmark 1996 federal law that devolved most of the responsibility for welfare policies and their implementation to the states. A thorough analysis of the available research leads to the identification of gaps in what is currently known about the effects of welfare reform. Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition specifies what-and why-we need to know about the response of individual states to the federal overhaul of welfare and the effects of the many changes in the nation's welfare laws, policies, and practices. With a clear approach to a variety of issues, Evaluating Welfare Reform in an Era of Transition will be important to policy makers, welfare administrators, researchers, journalists, and advocates on all sides of the issue.

In Welfare Reform, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation to an economic model of behavior.

For most citizens of the US, the jeremiad of the American Dream and pulling oneself up by your own bootstraps is a fallacy. With 45 million people currently falling below the official poverty line and 52.2 million people enrolled in some form of means tested government assistance, it is clear that we have a poverty problem. Current poverty levels are politically unacceptable and socially unnecessary. Given the aggressive nature in which the US government fought the War on Poverty in the 1960's, it is shocking that these numbers are still so high. Existing social policy, rather than working to provide stepping stones for legitimate mobility, often instead provides just enough to maintain the status quo, keeping people dependent on welfare programs. This article uses the longitudinal Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) to answer the question: How effective is social welfare policy in eradicating poverty? Existing research on social policy fails to acknowledge the all-encompassing nature of poverty. By focusing narrowly on the efficacy of a single program, researchers ignore the intricacies of life in poverty. Instead, we aim to analyze the socioeconomic and political climates surrounding housing policies in Oakland and Detroit in order to better understand where the social policy falls short and what it ignores. Through an examination of social welfare policy related to housing from 1978 to 2010, we find that the mechanisms through which social welfare policy has failed to eradicate systemic inequity and the ways that it perpetuates this inequity. Using housing policy, we will illuminate the limitations and barriers policymakers face so that moving forward, they can more adequately address these barriers, resulting in more effective policy.