Spotlight on Work Incentives

Spotlight on Work Incentives brings together COSM scholars’ research and commentary on the importance of work. The collection explores how policy can promote upward mobility by strengthening work incentives—from the effects of the 1996 welfare reform to the role of work in today’s tax credits and safety-net programs.

SNAP and Employment: What Is the Evidence?

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) reduces employment incentives among eligible individuals because benefits provide income support independent of work. Work requirements are intended to counteract these labor supply disincentives by mandating that recipients work or participate in work-related activities to maintain eligibility. Evidence consistently shows the implementation of SNAP work requirements reduces program participation, while findings on employment effects are more mixed. Overall, the evidence suggests that SNAP may discourage work and that work requirements can mitigate these disincentives in some contexts, though employment impacts vary across populations and policy environments.

May 23, 2025 | By Angela Rachidi

The Share of Medicaid Recipients in Compliance with the House Bill’s Community Engagement Requirement

The reconciliation proposal approved by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in 2025 would impose community engagement requirements on nondisabled, working-age Medicaid recipients without dependent children, requiring at least 80 hours per month of work, training, education, or community service during a specified number of months to maintain eligibility. Analysis using Survey of Income and Program Participation data indicates that, as of December 2022, 44–60 percent of the 18.2 million recipients subject to the requirement would already be in compliance, depending on how many months of participation states require. As a result, 7.3 million–10.3 million recipients would need to increase their work or other qualifying activities to retain Medicaid coverage.

May 20, 2025 | By Kevin Corinth

President Trump’s USDA Should Fix Food Stamp Work Requirement Waivers

A 2019 regulation would tighten the criteria states use to waive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents. Under existing policy, states can qualify for waivers using several broad criteria and can group contiguous areas together, allowing many counties to receive waivers even when unemployment rates are relatively low. Using county-level data from 1997 to 2023, simulations show that the 2019 rule would substantially reduce waiver eligibility, increase the responsiveness of waivers to changes in local unemployment, and better target waivers to areas with the weakest labor markets.

January 21, 2025 | By Richard Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, Thomas O'Rourke, and Angela Rachidi

Coverage, Counter-cyclicality and Targeting of Work Requirement Waivers in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program limits benefits for able-bodied adults without dependents unless they work at least 20 hours per week, but states have historically been able to waive this requirement in areas deemed to have weak labor markets. A new county-level dataset of waivers from 1997 to 2023 shows that waivers expanded substantially over time and were somewhat responsive to unemployment changes but were frequently granted in counties with relatively low unemployment. Simulations indicate that specific waiver rules—particularly the 20 percent unemployment rule and the ability to group counties—significantly increased waiver coverage and weakened targeting to areas with the weakest labor markets.

December 30, 2024 | By Richard V. Burkhauser, Kevin Corinth, Thomas O'Rourke, and Angela Rachidi

Work Requirement Waivers Increased FoodShare Caseloads and Costs in Wisconsin

At the time this report was prepared, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program limited benefits for able-bodied adults without dependent children to three months out of a three-year period unless they worked or participated in qualifying activities for at least 80 hours per month. This report argues that frequent waivers of this requirement in Wisconsin weakened its implementation and increased program participation. Analysis of FoodShare data from 2012 to 2023 suggests that waiving the requirement increased participation by roughly 780 adults per county per month, or about 56,000 additional recipients statewide, and increased program spending. Expanded participation among work-capable adults is associated with lower employment and greater reliance on government assistance.

October 23, 2024 | By Angela Rachidi

New Study Exposes the Problem with Unconditional Aid

A randomized, controlled trial providing low-income families with $12,000 annually found that the share of recipients working declined by 2 percentage points. This finding is consistent with previous research on lottery winnings and expanded child tax credit payments that similarly finds reductions in earnings or employment in response to cash transfers. A nationwide universal basic income would be prohibitively expensive and likely reduce work effort. Policies that phased out benefits as income rose would lower costs but impose implicit penalties on additional earnings, which research suggests would further reduce employment.

July 23, 2024 | By Kevin Corinth

Critiquing Bastian (2022, 2023, 2024, and forthcoming): On Child Tax Credit Reform and the Sensitivity of Single Mothers to Work Incentives

In 2021, Congress passed and President Biden signed a major, but temporary, reform to the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Among other reforms to the credit, the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) made it available to non-workers on the same basis as workers. Attempts to make this reform permanent foundered, in part, due to opposition from policymakers who worried that the new credit would lead workers to withdraw from the labor force and otherwise discourage work. These concerns drew strength from a working paper by a team of economists at the University of Chicago, published that fall, that predicted that making the ARPA CTC permanent would lead nearly 1.5 million parents to leave employment, most of them lower-income single mothers.

May 16, 2024 | By Scott Winship

An Early Look at the Child Tax Credit Changes in the Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024

The Tax Relief for American Families and Workers Act of 2024 would expand the child tax credit by increasing the refundable credit, indexing the maximum benefit to inflation, raising the phase-in rate for families with multiple children, and allowing a one-year earnings lookback. These changes would increase benefits primarily for lower-earning families, especially those with multiple children or intermittent work. However, the policy would have mixed effects on incentives: The faster phase-in would strengthen incentives to enter work at low earnings levels but discourage some families from increasing their earnings or getting married. In addition, the lookback provision would generally weaken work participation incentives.

March 28, 2024 | By Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship

How Sensitive Are Single Mothers’ Work Decisions to a Change in Incentives? Correcting Misperceptions of the Evidence

Estimates of how employment responds to changes in single mothers’ return to work are central to evaluating policies such as child tax credit expansions. A review of decades of research finds that commonly used labor supply elasticity estimates cluster around 0.75, with averages of roughly 0.8 across both literature reviews and original studies. These findings indicate that the assumption of a 0.75 elasticity in policy analyses is consistent with the broader empirical literature rather than an outlier estimate.

January 30, 2024 | By Kevin Corinth and Scott Winship

Let’s Not Turn the Child Tax Credit Into Welfare

Proposed changes to the child tax credit (CTC) would expand benefits for low-income families, allow the credit to grow with inflation, and permit families with no current earnings to receive the credit based on prior-year income, weakening the annual work requirement. These changes would shift the CTC away from its role as work-linked tax relief toward being an unconditional cash benefit for families with children. Estimates suggest that eliminating the annual work requirement would reduce employment, raising broader questions about whether the CTC should function as primarily tax relief or a welfare program.

January 29, 2024 | By Kevin Corinth

The Work Incentive and Employment Effects of Eliminating the Child Tax Credit’s Annual Income Requirement

Proposed 2024 child tax credit reforms would let families calculate eligibility using either current-year or prior-year income, significantly weakening the credit’s annual work requirement. The analysis estimates that this change would encourage some nonworking parents to enter employment while causing more consistently employed parents to stop working in some years. On net, the policy is projected to reduce employment by an average of 153,000 parents per year while also creating incentives for year-to-year fluctuations in work and hours.

January 19, 2024 | By Kevin Corinth, Angela Rachidi, Matt Weidinger, and Scott Winship

To Better Promote Work, Stop Subsidizing More Benefit Collection

“Income disregard” policies allow welfare programs to ignore the value of certain government benefits when determining eligibility, making recipients appear poorer than they are and consequently expanding assistance. Pandemic-era policies temporarily disregarded large stimulus payments and other enhanced benefits, contributing to sharp increases in Medicaid and food stamp enrollment. Because many programs already disregard major sources of government support, proposals to expand unconditional benefits while continuing to ignore them in eligibility calculations would further discourage work and expand participation in welfare programs.

January 11, 2024 | By Matt Weidinger

The Comeback City

After decades of rising crime, rising poverty, and economic decline, New York City experienced a dramatic turnaround beginning in the mid-1990s under the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Governor George Pataki, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The shift reflected a change in governing philosophy that emphasized individual responsibility, market-oriented policies, and data-driven accountability rather than expanded social spending. Policies such as “broken windows” policing, welfare reforms that prioritized work, tax reductions to encourage economic growth, and school reforms that increased accountability and choice contributed to falling crime, declining welfare dependence, stronger employment, and broader economic revival.

November 14, 2023 | By Robert Doar

Employment in SNAP: Setting the Record Straight

Claims that most Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) households already work often rely on census survey data that suffer from significant reporting errors and broad definitions of employment. Many recipients fail to report benefits in surveys, and some analyses count work at any point in the past year rather than while households actually receive SNAP, which overstates employment. Administrative SNAP quality control data instead show that fewer than one-third of SNAP households include a worker at the time benefits are received. Properly interpreted, the evidence suggests that employment during SNAP receipt is relatively low, supporting policies aimed at encouraging work among recipients who are able.

July 12, 2023 | By Angela Rachidi and Thomas O'Rourke

A Safety Net for the Future: Overcoming the Root Causes of Poverty

The 1996 welfare reform law replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, shifting the safety net toward work requirements, time limits, and greater state flexibility and accountability. Following these reforms, welfare caseloads fell sharply, employment among single mothers increased, and child poverty declined. However, many other programs subsequently expanded due in part to their lack of similar pro-work features, contributing to a complex system of rising spending on over 80 federal means-tested programs. Federal reforms should refocus the broader safety net on promoting work and marriage, strengthen state incentives to move recipients into employment, and reform refundable tax credits to better reward work while encouraging state innovation and accountability.

December 31, 2022 | By Angela Rachidi, Matt Weidinger, and Scott Winship

Turning Back the Clock on Welfare Reform

The 1996 welfare reform law replaced an open-ended cash welfare system with a work-based program that imposed time limits on benefits, required able-bodied adult recipients to engage in work or training, capped federal funding, and increased state accountability. Following the reform, welfare caseloads fell sharply, employment among single mothers rose, and poverty declined as earnings increased and pro-work benefits like childcare and refundable tax credits expanded. Recent policies providing unconditional cash benefits for families with children and increasing food stamp benefits reverse key elements of that work-based framework by providing substantial assistance to households without requiring employment or activity on their part.

August 23, 2021 | By Matt Weidinger

Reforming Tax Credits to Promote Child Opportunity and Aid Working Families

Reducing poverty should focus on not only short-term income support but also expanding opportunity and promoting upward mobility. Unconditional cash transfers risk discouraging work, marriage, and other behaviors associated with long-term economic mobility. Proposed reforms to the earned income tax credit and child tax credit would strengthen work and marriage incentives, better target tax relief to working- and middle-class families, and create “success sequence” savings accounts that build assets for children from low-income families who meet education, work, and family formation milestones.

July 29, 2021 | By Scott Winship

The Conservative Case Against Child Allowances

Child allowances would provide unconditional cash payments to families with children as a strategy to reduce child poverty. However, such policies risk increasing unemployment in single-parent households and could weaken work incentives, potentially worsening long-term poverty and reversing gains made since the 1990s welfare reforms. Evidence on these effects is mixed, but historical experience suggests that work-oriented policies contributed to large increases in employment among single mothers and substantial reductions in child poverty. Alternative antipoverty policies that build on work-based reforms may therefore reduce poverty while posing fewer risks to employment and family stability.

March 5, 2021 | By Scott Winship

Democrats’ Stealth Plan to Enact Universal Basic Income

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily expanded the child tax credit by increasing benefit amounts, making the credit fully refundable (that is, payable without regard to earnings for the first time), and distributing payments monthly. The effect was a child allowance providing monthly government benefit checks to parents regardless of work—a de facto universal basic income for parents. That temporary policy shift moved away from the framework established by the 1996 welfare reform law, which ended the widespread payment of work-free welfare checks.

March 2, 2021 | By Robert Doar and Matt Weidinger

‘Child Allowances’ Revive Welfare as We Knew It

The 1996 welfare reform law replaced the failed Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with a system of block grants and time-limited benefits tied to work or training. Those reforms contributed to higher employment and earnings and lower poverty and welfare dependence among single-parent families. Notably, that law ended the individual entitlement to monthly welfare checks for nonworking parents. Proposals to expand the child tax credit into a monthly child allowance without a work requirement would effectively restore that entitlement, reviving key features of the failed former program.

February 5, 2021 | By Matt Weidinger

How Effective Are Work Requirements?

US safety-net programs already use work requirements to address potential work disincentives, and evidence suggests they increase employment and earnings among recipients capable of work. Critics often cite welfare-to-work experiments from the 1990s as evidence against work requirements, but the most relevant programs in those evaluations—“jobs-first” approaches that emphasized rapid employment—produced substantial gains in work and earnings. Although research on work requirements in programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid is more limited and subject to measurement challenges, broader evidence indicates that participation in safety-net programs can reduce employment incentives, implying that work requirements could offset those effects.

August 1, 2018 | By Angela Rachidi and Robert Doar

Congress Needs a Pro-Work Agenda for Financial Security of Americans

At the time this piece was prepared, labor force participation had fallen to a 20-year low, raising concerns that job creation from tax reform may not translate to sustained economic growth without more workers entering the labor force. This piece argues that increasing labor force participation, particularly among low-income and nonworking adults, requires a pro-work policy agenda that reforms safety-net programs to encourage employment and expands tax provisions that reduce the cost of working, such as refundable childcare tax credits. Strengthening work incentives in welfare and tax policy is essential for supporting economic growth and employing more Americans.

November 29, 2017 | By Angela Rachidi

A Safety Net That Works: Improving Federal Programs for Low-Income Americans

Despite reductions in material hardship, many Americans believe that progress against poverty has been limited and that upward mobility remains difficult. Much of the improvement in living standards for low-income families has come from government assistance rather than increased earnings from work, contributing to dissatisfaction with current antipoverty efforts. A more effective approach would emphasize employment for able-bodied adults, stable two-parent families, and a safety net that reduces hardship while supporting work. Improving federal assistance programs therefore requires understanding how they function and reforming them to better promote earnings and upward mobility.

January 1, 2017 | By Robert Doar and Bruce D. Meyer

View All Content On Work

There Are Many Reasons to Cheer Up About the State of the Middle Class

April 11, 2026 | Scott Winship

This piece originally appeared at National Review Online and is reprinted here with permission. Statistics show that the middle class is healthier and more secure than ever before. This week, Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote that he doesn’t think he’s “ever been so depressed” as when he read my recent report with Steve Rose, “The Middle Class is...

Missing Boy Jacob Pritchett Is a Reminder of Why We Can’t Leave Disabled Kids with Ill-Equipped Parents

March 29, 2026 | Naomi Schaefer Riley

It has been a year since anyone saw Jacob Pritchett. The 11-year-old boy, who is autistic and nonverbal, was reported missing in October. But, as far as anyone can tell, he was last seen through his window on April 2, 2025, by a property manager at his NYCHA apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn....

Refocusing the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation on Achieving Deep Cost Reductions

March 26, 2026 | James C. Capretta

Spending on Medicare and Medicaid is pushing the federal budget to the breaking point, but, in the aftermath of the cuts enacted in the 2025 reconciliation bill, Congress might have difficulty producing another round of necessary savings in the near term. To make continued progress on health care spending restraint while...

The More Things Change, Medicaid Edition

March 25, 2026 | James C. Capretta

“Clinics” with suspect professional credentials running up bills for publicly-insured low-income patients. Outlandish claim volumes for questionable services, including unneeded tests and consultations. Harmful and abusive treatment of patients in some cases. And then the understandable outrage in Washington, DC that no one at the state level seems to notice...