This report was authored by Mathematica Policy Research with funding from the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration. Conducting site visits to eight local sites, this report details findings from the post-summer youth employment initiative, designed as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. States received funding to give States the option to continue to fund work experience opportunities for out-of-school youth ages 18 to 24 for an additional six months.

From Civic Enterprises, the America's Promise Alliance, and Peter D. Hart Research Associates, this report provides findings from a survey of youth ages 16 to 24, who were not enrolled in school, not employed, and not planning to enroll in school in the coming year. Among the findings, 73 percent of respondents stated that they were very confident in being able to reach their goals in life and were optimistic about their futures. Around 75 percent had a goal of finishing high school or college and also accept responsibility for their own future.

Over the past two decades, federal and state policymakers have dramatically reshaped the nation’s system of cash welfare assistance for low-income families. Through national legislation and state-initiated reform and experimentation, policymakers transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996. During this period, state approaches to welfare reform have varied considerably. Nevertheless, almost all reform efforts have encouraged adult welfare recipients to work more and, as a result, to reduce their families’ long-term reliance on welfare benefits. In addition, many state welfare pro-grams have incorporated financial incentives that have encouraged work and supplemented the incomes of employed TANF recipients, and have also experimented with ways to help workers—employed TANF recipients and those who leave the TANF rolls with employment—retain employment and advance in the labor market. (author abstract)

From the Congressional Research Service (CRS), this report provides names and contact information for CRS experts on policy concerns relating to economic recovery and job losses, preservation, and creation. Policy areas identified include factors shaping the slowdown; broad policy options: coordination and tradeoffs; stimulus proposals: size, composition, and timing; and mortgage market support.

This report uses meta-analysis, a set of statistically based techniques for combining  quantitative findings from different studies, to synthesize estimates of program effects from  random assignment evaluations of welfare-to-work programs and to explore the factors that best explain differences in the programs' performance. The analysis is based on data extracted from the published evaluation reports and from official sources.  All the programs included in the analysis targeted recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC; now called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, TANF).  The objective of the analysis is to establish the principal characteristics of welfare-to-work programs that were associated with differences in success, distinguishing between variations in the services received, differences in the characteristics of those who participated in each program, and variations in the socio-economic environment in which the programs operated. (author abstract)

This resource is also publlished as a discussion paper by the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin.

This report summarizes the final impact results for the national Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project. This project tested, using a random assignment design, the effectiveness of numerous programs intended to promote steady work and career advancement. All the programs targeted current and former welfare recipients and other low-wage workers, most of whom were single mothers. Given that earlier retention and advancement initiatives studied for these groups were largely not effective, ERA sought to examine a variety of programs that states and localities had developed for different populations, to determine whether effective strategies could be identified. In short, nine of the twelve programs examined in this report do not appear to be effective, but three programs increased employment levels, employment stability, and/or earnings, relative to control group levels, after three to four years of follow-up.

Key Findings:

 - Out of the twelve programs included in the report, three ERA programs produced positive economic impacts; nine did not. All three programs increased employment retention and advancement. Increases in employment retention and earnings were largest and most consistent over time in the Texas ERA program in Corpus Christi (one of three sites that operated this program); the Chicago ERA program; and the Riverside County, California, Post-Assistance Self-Sufficiency (PASS) ERA program. These programs increased annual earnings by between 7 percent and 15 percent relative to control group levels. Each of them served a different target group, which suggests that employment retention and advancement programs can work for a range of populations. However, three-fourths of the ERA programs included in this report did not produce gains in targeted outcomes beyond what control group members were able to attain on their own with the existing services and supports available in the ERA sites.

 - Increases in participation beyond control group levels were not consistent or large, which may have made it difficult for the programs to achieve impacts on employment retention and advancement. Engaging individuals in employment and retention services at levels above what they would have done in the absence of the programs was a consistent challenge. In addition, staff had to spend a lot of time and resources on placing unemployed individuals back into jobs, which made it difficult for them to focus on helping those who were already working to keep their jobs or move up.

Before the ERA project began, there was not much evidence about the types of programs that could improve employment retention and advancement outcomes for current or former welfare recipients. The ERA evaluation provides valuable insights about the nature of retention and advancement problems and it underscores a number of key implementation challenges that a program would have to address. In addition, it reveals shortcomings in a range of common approaches now in use, while identifying three distinct approaches that seem promising and worthy of further exploration. (author abstract)

This 12-page practitioner brief focuses on one aspect of the ERA programs — that is, their strategies to reemploy the many program participants who quickly lost jobs. Limited rigorous evidence is available on reemployment strategies. Moreover, the ERA evaluation was not designed to test the effectiveness of the specific strategies discussed in this document. However, the experiences — successful or not — across the ERA programs can provide important lessons for developing or operating employment programs for current and former welfare recipients. The reemployment services that were offered to newly unemployed individuals are similar to job placement services in programs that target unemployed populations generally, but there are differences, particularly in using recent job loss as a learning tool in finding the next job.

While preventing job loss can be an appropriate goal for retention and advancement programs, the ERA study illustrates how challenging it is to keep individuals in a particular job. Programs might consider redefining “retention” as sustained employment across jobs rather than as sustained employment in any one job. The focus in this brief is on how to address job loss once it has happened: structuring job search and job placement services for those who have recently lost their jobs, with the goal of reducing the length of unemployment, improving the quality of the new job over the previous one, and achieving greater employment stability over time. The lessons address three overarching questions:

How can programs learn about participants’ job losses quickly?

Which strategies might contribute to faster reemployment?

How can managers organize staff and resources to address job loss?  (author abstract)

As the United States continues to face high unemployment in the wake of the recent recession, federally funded workforce programs can play an important role in bridging gaps between the skills present in the workforce and the skills needed for available jobs. The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) sought to strengthen the connection between workforce programs and employers, but GAO’s prior work has found that collaboration remains a challenge. With WIA currently awaiting reauthorization, GAO reviewed (1) factors that facilitated innovative collaborations among workforce boards, employers, and others; (2) major challenges to collaboration; and (3) actions the Department of Labor has taken to support local collaborative efforts. GAO examined 14 local initiatives identified by experts as among the most promising or innovative efforts in which local workforce boards collaborated effectively with employers and other partners to achieve positive results. GAO interviewed representatives of the 14 initiatives and officials from five federal agencies. GAO also reviewed reports on the initiatives and relevant federal laws, regulations, and other documents