The Joint Center for Poverty Research (JCPR) is organizing a September Research Institute that will examine how welfare reform has affected people who have serious difficulty finding jobs. In addition, it will present research on services and safety-net policies that may improve their prospects. Included in this hard-to-employ group are families who may be dealing with personal, family, or community problems—lack of child care, poor public transportation, life in high crime areas, or workplace discrimination. These problems may significantly lower their chances of gaining or sustaining paid work or advancing beyond low-wage careers.

“The Hard-to-Employ and Welfare Reform” conference will be held at Georgetown University on September 20-21, 2001. Organizers are JCPR Director Greg Duncan (IPR-Education and Social Policy) and JCPR Deputy Director Susan Mayer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School.

Potential topics include the demography of hard-to-employ families and the extent to which they have been affected by welfare reform; promising approaches to providing services for these families; and how federal and state government might structure safety-net policies to best address their needs.

Conference proceedings. JCPR has produced several books and journal issues based on research presented at its conferences. Among them:
- Proceedings of a December 2000 conference on “Incen-tive Effects of Tax and Transfer Policies” will be produced as an online volume that will include the conference summary, policy briefs of each paper, and downloadable papers.

- A book titled For Better and For Worse: Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Children and Families, edited by Duncan and P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale (IPR-Education and Social Policy), is forthcoming in the fall of 2001 from Russell Sage Press. It contains papers from a JCPR conference they organized at Georgetown University in September1999.

- Upjohn Press plans to publish Rural Dimensions of Welfare Reform: Welfare, Food Assistance, and Poverty in Rural America, which is based on papers from a conference JCPR held in May 2000. The book was edited by conference organizers Duncan, Bruce Weber, and Leslie Whitener. Publication is expected in the fall of 2001.

- Papers from JCPR’s 1999 conference on the Earned Income Tax Credit appeared in a special issue of the National Tax Journal (53:4, Part 2, December 2000), edited by Bruce Meyer (IPR-Economics). He is expanding the issue into a book that Russell Sage will publish. Meyer also edited a volume of papers from a 1999 conference on tax and transfer programs that will appear as a special issue of the Journal of Public Economics.