View Research by Author - Patrick T. Sharkey

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/PatrickTSharkey

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured commissioned this report to learn more about the role that Medicaid plays in the ability of homeless people to get health care. This report examines the ability of homeless people to get the health care they need, and the factors that affect their receipt of care. Within the general rubric of health care we include treatment for physical health, mental health, and substance abuse problems.

This report examines the development, current structure, and likely future of Continuums of Care (CoCs) for homeless people throughout the United States. It describes how communities organize themselves to respond to homelessness, how they identify needs and plan their strategies, and how the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's requirement that communities submit a single, community-wide, coordinated application for funding has affected the development of homeless networks and services. Involvement of mainstream agencies (e.g., housing, mental health, veterans affairs) and the ease or difficulty of navigating the service system from a client's perspective is also examined. Information comes from case studies of a sample of 25 CoCs scoring highly on ratings of their annual funding applications.

This study examines new data from the 1996 National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients (NSHAPC) with an explicit focus on comparing homeless assistance programs administered by faith-based and secular non-profit organizations. It describes how the two groups compare in terms of specific numbers and types of programs; numbers of program contacts; types of clients and special population focus (battered women, families, runaway youth, people with alcohol, drug or mental health problems, etc.); program administrators' assessments of homeless clients' needs; how clients are referred to/from programs; and how much government funding they receive.

This paper provides new evidence to inform the policy debate about the effect of a newly important industry -- the temporary help industry –- on the labor market outcomes of low-income workers and those at risk of being on public assistance. We use several years of CPS data to document differences in characteristics and employment outcomes between temporary help workers and those in traditional work arrangements. We then use a model-based approach, exploiting SIPP data and using propensity score matching techniques, to compare outcomes for low-income and at-risk workers in the temporary help industry both with those of similar workers in traditional employment and of nonworkers. The analysis shows that workers who are at risk of welfare recipiency are more than twice as likely to be in alternative work arrangements as other workers. An examination of outcomes one year later, including wages, employment duration, and benefits, indicate that, not surprisingly, temporary workers had worse earnings and employment outcomes a year later than did similar individuals initially working in standard employment. Temporary workers fared substantially better one year later than did those who were initially not employed; temporary workers are nearly twice as likely to be working one year later. Although temporary workers do fare worse than those employed in traditional work, their outcomes one year later are much closer to those of standard workers than those of unemployed workers.

The role of alternative work arrangements - temporary help, independent contractors, on-call workers, and contract company workers - has caught the attention of both policymakers and academic researchers alike. Current research indicates that 1 in 10 workers are employed in one of these four alternative work arrangements and employment in the temporary help services industry grew five times as fast as overall non-farm employment between 1972 and 1997.

Return to list of authors