Impacts of Eligibility Expansions and Provider Reimbursement Rate Increases on Child Care Subsidy Take-Up Rates, Welfare Use and Work

Abstract

Walsh provided invaluable guidance. They helped us to document and understand Rhode Island's child care policy changes associated with Starting RIght. Sherry Campanelli also provided us with contacts in various Rhode Island agencies in addition to DHS, such as the Department of Transportation, the Department of Education and the Department of Labor and Training (DLT), and with valuable comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this report. She worked with us to develop a time line of changes taking place during the study period. Randy Rosati worked with us to develop data requests, and he worked with us and with employees of Network Six to extract data from DHS's administrative databases. He provided numerous interpretations and guides as our work progressed. He also worked with us and with personnel at DLT to obtain quarterly earnings reports from the Unemployment Insurance database. On the policy front, we would like to thank Nancy Tikkanen for helping us to understand the Family Independence Program (FIP) and Dorothy Karolyshyn for helping us understand the nuances of child care policies and other social welfare regulations in Rhode Island. Kim Keating and Louisa Tarullo helped us to obtain Head Start data and to understand the changes in Head Start that have occurred during welfare reform. Laura Beavers provided us with valuable data from Rhode Island's Kids Count historical databases. Marie Gariepy provided us with data on public school kindergarten programs. We also wish to express our appreciation to Dr. Pia Divine from the Child Care Bureau. Finally, Sherry Campanelli, Karen Tvedt (Child Care Bureau) and Helen Tauchen (UNC Chapel Hill) provided valuable comments and suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The Geographic Accessibility of Child Care Subsidies and Evidence on the Impact of Subsidy Receipt on Childhood Obesity

“…To be eligible for CCDF funds, families must have at least one child ages 0 to 13; parents are required to participate in a state-defined acceptable work activity; and total income must fall below 85 percent of the state median income. In practice, however, the extraordinary amount of state variation in eligibility rules creates difficulties for precisely simulating eligibility (Giannarelli et al, 2001;Witte & Queralt, 2003). Therefore, we define the analysis sample to include families in the bottom three quintiles of the full sample socioeconomic status (SES) distribution.…”

What We Know, What We Don't Know, and What We Need to Know about Welfare Reform

“…Part B of Table 3 lists two recent papers on child care changes related to welfare reform. Both Witte and Queralt (2003) and Tekin (2005) find that child care subsidies from welfare reform had a substantial effect on the usage of center-based care. This is consistent with similar findings from the earlier welfare-to-work demonstration projects (Gennetian et al 2004).…”

Why Do They Leave? Child Care Subsidy Use in Oregon

“…A number of studies have examined take-up rates into the child care subsidy program and found that many parents who appear to be eligible for child care subsidies do not use them (e.g., Meyers and Heintze 1999;Witte and Queralt 2003). Lee et al (2004) estimated that half of the single mothers leaving TANF became eligible for subsidy during a followup period, yet the take-up rate for subsidies never exceeded 35%.…”