This application outlines a study of welfare and employment dynamics using matched data from the Three City Study and administrative records from various governmental welfare and employment sources. The Three City Study is a major welfare monitoring project which has gathered longitudinal survey data on a set of low income families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. Two waves (1999 and 2000 2001) have been gathered and a third wave will take place in 2005. This project has a data collection goal and an analysis goal. (1) The data collection goal is to gather administrative records from TANF, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, and several other public assistance and social service agencies on the families in the survey, to match them to the survey, and to develop a restricted use file for other researchers. The matched data set will be a very unique one for the study of welfare reform and welfare dynamics and should be of broad interest. (2) The analysis goal is to use the matched data to conduct a primary analysis of welfare and employment dynamics using state of the art econometric methods and to conduct series of additional substantive and methodological analyses. These additional analyses include a study of methods of efficient estimation models which use the survey data and the universe (not just the matched sample) of administrative data; a study of the well known seam problem in event history surveys; an examination of the effects of work requirements, time limits and sanctions on welfare use and employment outcomes; and studies of welfare participation of children of immigrants, employment patterns of Latinas, aging low income mothers, and social service use in Chicago.
