Recent research has suggested that employment programs for welfare recipients may be most effective if resources a re systematically targeted on those most likely to remain on public assistance a long time. Data from a series of random assignment fiel d experiments testing low- to moderate-cost welfare employment program s are utilized to examine targeting alternatives for adult Aid to Families with Dependent Children recipients. The empirical evidence does not provide unqualified supp ort for narrow targeting of either the least or most dependent welfare groups and suggests that a choice among strategies may depend on the relative weights policymakers place on reducing welfare versus increasing family income.

In this paper we follow previous research by using experimental data to assess the two nonexperimental evaluation approaches. Our data are from a series of social experiments conducted in several states during the 1980s to evaluate programs aimed at helping welfare recipients find jobs. We simulate the two nonexperimental approaches by creating comparison groups from the true control groups and by comparing the resultant nonexperimental estimates of program effects with experimentally derived estimates of program effects. Although experimental data are required to provide an assessment of the nonexperimental approaches they are not required to create the comparison groups in practice. Thus our results have direct implications for choosing a nonexperimental evaluation strategy when an experiment is not feasible. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section I describes the social experiments and the various comparison groups created for the analysis. Section II discusses the methods used to generate and assess the nonexperimental estimates. Section III presents the empirical results and Section IV offers some conclusions. (excerpt)

This article examines past evaluations of government training programs for the economically disadvantaged and offers an agenda for future research. It is found that government training programs are producing modest increases in earnings for adult men and women, but are probably not producing positive effects for youth. Future research must better document links between program-provided training and acquisition of valuable skills and must explore potential returns from increased scale. The recent adoption of random assignment has improved the accuracy of field evaluations but would benefit from an economic theory of evaluation to guide research into increasing training effectiveness.