Cheng Hsiao, Yan Shen, Boqing Wang, and Greg Weeks, “Evaluating the Impacts of Washington State Repeated Job Search Services on the Earnings of Prime-age Female TANF Recipients”, Journal of Applied Econometrics, forthcoming.

The data used in this paper are confidential. This file provides some basis information about the datasets that were used.

The datasets contain information on WorkFirst, the welfare-to-work strategy of the State of Washington. Washington initiated the WorkFirst program in August 1997 to help low income families become self-sufficient by providing job placement services, counseling, training, and support services for welfare recipients. We first briefly describe the WorkFirst program and then describe our data.

The WorkFirst Program

The WorkFirst program serves three groups of people:

(a) Parents and children age sixteen or older who receive cash assistance under the temporary assistance for needy families (TANF), general assistance for pregnant women (GA-S) or state family assistance (SFA) programs; and

(b) Parents who no longer receive cash assistance and need some continuing support to remain self-sufficient; and

(c) Low income parents who support their family without applying for or relying on cash assistance.

The main service of WorkFirst is Job Search Assistance. Job Search Assistance may include one or more of the following forms:

(i) Classroom instruction;

(ii) Structured job search that helps to find job openings, complete applications, practice interviews and apply other skills and abilities with a job search specialist or a group of fellow job-seekers; and/or

(iii) Preemployment training;

(iv) High-wage/high-demand training.

When clients first enter WorkFirst, they will work together with case managers to develop Individual Responsibility Plan (IRP). As the initial focus is to assist them in finding employment, they will be first introduced to job search. Periods of job search services may last up to twelve continuous weeks.

The Datasets

The data can be divided into two parts: (1) Characteristics of the individuals that apply for the WorkFirst program; (2) participation situation of the individuals.

There are 119539 persons with multiple observations with records from several data sets, with details given at the table below. Explanatory variables are obtained through combining these files.

Table 1 Datasets and Corresponding Description

File Name	Description
card_dat	Monthly data, contains demographic information except marital status and education status and information about family size, household relations, housing, geographical information and benefits client get from the WorkFirst. With 7,604,969 observations for 119,538 clients.
Cl_mo	With 4,082,524 observations for 108,100 clients. Monthly data. Contains information about whether one receives TANF penalty, food stamp penalty, one’s status (from here we can construct participation and control group), and earnings and hours worked info, and marital status.
compcode	With 2,520,444 observations for 108,158 clients. Irregular daily data. This is the file that contains information about when individuals enter the program, activities in the program, scheduled hours and case manager etc.
wage	With 2,390,760 observations for 119,538 clients. Quarterly data from UI.
eligibility	With 4,718,475 observations for 105,645 clients. Monthly data.
county	This file contains local monthly unemployment rate
JAS	With 764,854 observations for 119,538 clients.

Description of the Data from Washington State

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2006-12-05T19:43:00