Reassessing welfare reform data: a response to cherry

Abstract

This is a response to Robert Cherry's comment on the article, “Welfare as We [Don't] Know It: A Review and Feminist Critique of Welfare Reform Research” that appeared in the 10(2) issue of Feminist Economics. This response argues that while some combination of welfare reform, the booming economy in the late 1990s, and changes in economic policy all worked together to decrease caseloads and increase employment rates among welfare leavers, these are incomplete measures of the impact of welfare reform on the lives of lone mothers. This paper also argues that the effects of welfare reform on lone mothers are more mixed than Cherry acknowledges. This paper concludes that when one holistically examines low-income lone mothers' lives, it is premature to declare welfare reform a success.     

An examination of EU trade disintegration scenarios

This paper demonstrates the welfare implications of the differential disintegration of the EU. Using a structural gravity approach, our estimates suggest that the rest of the EU countries have much more to lose from the disintegration of the EU compared to a disorderly Brexit. At the same time, neighbouring high‐income and middle‐income countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina and Norway, are expected to benefit from EU disintegration under some scenarios because trade would be diverted from EU countries.     

Masculinities and gender-based violence in South Africa: A study of a masculinities-focused intervention programme

Violence, and particularly gender-based violence (GBV), has become an increasingly serious problem in the democratic era in South Africa. While numerous suggestions have been offered for why this is the case, a growing body of literature links the perpetration of violence and GBV to the expectations of men’s prescribed gender roles, or their masculinities. In response to this, some organisations have begun working specifically with men as a violence prevention mechanism, through the use of masculinities-focused interventions. This paper uses a South African example as a case study, looking primarily at how men who participate in the intervention understand masculinities and violence, and the impact that the intervention has on this understanding. Results suggest that violence has become largely normalised in the country, but that the intervention can play a role in beginning to problematise that normalisation.     

A Trinomial Logit Analysis of Household Composition

This article analyzes the effects on the marriage and household composition decisions of characteristics of the householder and of the place of residence. High housing costs reduced the probability of living alone. For female householders, increases in income decreased the probability of living alone rather than with unrelated individuals; the reverse was true for male householders. An increase in income decreased the probability of marriage for female householders over twenty-three years of age and increased the probability of marriage for male householders. Non-white householders over forty were less likely to be married than white householders over forty.     

HOUSEHOLD SAVING IN THE '90s: EVIDENCE FROM CROSS-SECTION WEALTH SURVEYS

This paper uses a series of cross-section surveys to measure how wealth accumulation and active saving rates varied across cohort-groups during the early and mid 1990s. Our estimated rates of saving and wealth change across cohorts show a somewhat more dramatic life-cycle pattern than found in previous studies, in part because we use a new technique, and in part because the cross-section wealth surveys we use oversample the wealthiest families whose behavior dominates aggregate changes. Adjusting the wealth-change rates for bequests and subtracting out the capital gains component of wealth change move the estimates in the direction of results from previous studies, but the biggest changes in that direction result from excluding the top of the wealth distribution in each year.