skip to main content
Washington State Institute for Public Policy

All of WSIPP's research is published on our website. The Publications page includes every report we've released—from our founding in 1983 to the present. Each report entry includes the title, publication date, abstract, any available supplemental materials, and a downloadable PDF.

WSIPP reports are not updated after publication, and any report older than two years is designated with an “Archived” label.

To explore our benefit-cost and meta-analytic findings, please visit the Benefit-Cost section of the website.

Use the search fields below to find specific publications that match certain criteria. If you want to find other information on our website that is not publications, you can use the search field in the navigation bar at the top, or click here to search the entire website.

Use the dropdown to select the field in which you would like to perform a keyword search.

Input the keyword you would like to search by in the textbox.

You can put multiple words inside quotes "like this" to indicate that you only want results where the entire phrase is found.

You can use the minus symbol "( - )" to indicate you only want results without the indicated word, such as: "teacher -substitute".


Select a publication author(s) to filter results by author. Once selected, you may remove an author from the search by clicking the "x".
"ANY of these authors" will return all results that include any of the authors you specified in your search criteria.

"ALL of these authors" will return only those results that include every author you specified in your search criteria.


Select a topic(s) to filter results by topic. Once selected, you may remove a topic from the search by clicking the "x".
"ANY of these topics" will return all results that include any of the topics you specified in your search criteria.

"ALL of these topics" will return only those results that include every topic you specified in your search criteria.


Select a date range if you would like to only see results published during a specified time period.

Publications

Found 1 results

Climbing the Wage Ladder (Archived)

Open Publication PDF

Greg Weeks, Carol Webster - December 1994

There are two schools of thought about the requirements of a successful welfare-towork program: One believes women on welfare should be encouraged to work, even at low-paying jobs, because steady work experience is a rung on a “wage ladder” that leads to jobs at higher wages. The other believes women on welfare should be encouraged to enroll in education and training to improve their skills and only take jobs with higher wages, because low-paying jobs are a dead end.

Previously, the Family Income Study found that both education/training and work experience affect the possibility of a woman leaving and staying off welfare. In this paper, we address the effects of work experience. We examined the hourly wages of women in the AFDC sample, who worked at least three months in any year during the five-year study period (1988-1992), to see if it was possible to “climb a wage ladder.”

Download:   Full Report  
Related: