View Research by Author - David Kassabian

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A central component of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is its emphasis on work. Adult TANF recipients, with some exceptions, must participate in work activities as a condition of receiving cash benefits. This brief focuses on the federal work requirements and state strategies for meeting them, especially since passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the recession that began in December 2007 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The brief documents the multiple strategies that states use to meet the participation rate requirements.

An important dimension of AFDC/TANF programs is the disincentives to work recipients face due to the reduction in benefits that comes with an increase in earnings. These disincentives can be represented as average (implicit) tax rates that depend directly on policy variables including the maximum benefit and the disregard policy in states. To help those interested in better understanding these implicit tax rates, we have provided a dataset of relevant summary variables including the maximum benefit, the effective tax rate on the first $500 of earnings (in 2010 dollars), the effective tax rate on a part-time full-month minimum wage job, and how these measures vary across families of different sizes for each state in each year from 1996 to 2010. The dataset and accompanying tables were derived from the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and are available as a PDF file (with documentation/discussion) or as an Excel file and Stata dataset.

The Welfare Rules Databook, provides tables containing key Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) policies for each state as of July 2010, as well as longitudinal tables describing selected state policies from 1996 through 2010. The tables are based on the information in the Welfare Rules Database (WRD), a publicly available, online database tracking state cash assistance policies over time and across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The Databook summarizes a subset of the information in the WRD. Users interested in a greater level of detail are encouraged to use the full database, available at http://anfdata.urban.org/wrd.

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