Ram Jagannathan
Biographic Data
| ID | 89087 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ram Jagannathan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ram |
| FAMILY NAME | Jagannathan |
| SIGNATURE | JAGANNATHAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5614-8176 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A multi-generational test of the conceptually guided, cultural metaphor in six capitalist democracies: Shortcuts to misunderstanding
Covid-19 and Parenting Challenges with Food Insecurity and Educational Vulnerability
Racial Disparities in Covid-19 Severity Are Partially Mediated by Chronic Stress-Evidence from a Large Integrated Healthcare System
The Association Between Black vs. White Race and 30-Day Hospitalization Among People Diagnosed with Covid-19 Within an Integrated Care Setting: A Cohort Study
Sleep and Economic Status Are Linked to Daily Life Stress in African-Born Blacks Living in America
To identify determinants of daily life stress in Africans in America, 156 African-born Blacks (Age: 40 ± 10 years (mean ± SD), range 22-65 years) who came to the United States as adults (age ≥ 18 years) were asked about stress, sleep, behavior and socioeconomic status. Daily life stress and sleep quality were assessed with the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), respectively. High-stress was defined by the thre…
Growing up poor but doing well: Contextual factors that predict academic success
Conceptualizing and testing the vicious cycle in child protective services: The critical role played by child maltreatment fatalities
Social outrage and organizational behavior: A national study of child protective service decisions
The Future of the Family Cap: Fertility Effects 18 Years Post-Implementation
Family caps are the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor, unmarried women. These policies generate a great deal of controversy due to the groups of women they target, the mechanisms through which they operate, and the effects they purport to produce. This article presents results from a national study with 18 years of post–family cap data. We find that family caps reduce nonmarital births by about 2 per 1,000 an…
Protecting Children in the Age of Outrage: A New Perspective on Child Protective Services Reform
This book proposes what, to many professionals in the child welfare field, will appear a radically different explanation for society's decisions to protect children from harm and for the significant drop in substantiated child abuse numbers. At the center of this conceptual and analytic approach is the contention that social outrage emanating from horrific and often sensationalized cases of child maltreatment plays a major role in CPS decision ma…
A Latent Growth Curve Model of Nonmarital Births, Abortions, and Pregnancies: Did Welfare Reform Play a Role in Changing the Trajectories
This article uses latent growth models to examine the effect of three welfare reform policies, viz., family caps, stricter work requirements, and time limits on fertility outcomes. The study is the first to extend the application of this statistical modeling approach to an examination of reproductive behavior. Using state level panel data for 1992–2005 we attempt to determine if welfare reform has contributed to changes in the trajectories of non…
The Effect of Child Support Enforcement on Abortion in the U nited S tates
OBJECTIVES: This project aims to answer a critically important question of public policy: Does effective child support enforcement lead to a change in the incidence of abortion across the United States? METHODS: Using state-level data collected from 1978–2003 from a variety of sources, we employ fixed effects regression analysis to examine whether financial security as measured by five types of child support enforcement effectiveness impacts abor…
Welfare reform's impact on caseload decline in the United States: An application of latent trajectory model
This paper examines the effect of welfare reform policies on caseload changes during 1992–2005. Using state-level panel data we estimate latent trajectory models to determine if welfare reform has contributed to changes in the trajectories of caseload growth (decline) beyond what would have naturally occurred through the passage of time. Our results show that (a) states vary considerably in both their mean initial level as well as linear trajecto…
The crucial role played by social outrage in efforts to reform child protective services
University-community partnering using a targeted mutual-interests approach
In this paper, we describe a six-year effort to create a university-community partnership in a disadvantaged neighborhood bordering Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We discuss the traditional community research and development (TCR&D) model employed by universities and how assumptions made by the university about the capacities of community brokering agents can significantly influence both the time and trajectory of partnership bu…
The Price Effects of Family Caps on Fertility Decisions of Poor Women
Family Caps have been a popular welfare reform policy designed to discourage women on welfare from bearing additional children. It has been thought that the principal mechanism through which a Cap achieves its objective of lower birth rates is the financial pressure placed on women by the denial of cash benefits. Our study uses instrumental variables Probit modeling to directly measure the contribution that price makes to Cap impact on births. We…
Experimental evidence of welfare reform impact on clinical anxiety and depression levels among poor women
How Family Caps Work: Evidence from a National Study
Many experts consider family caps to be the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor unmarried women. Despite the operation of such caps in 23 states, research reports mixed findings on the policy’s effectiveness in reducing nonmarital births. This article presents results from a national study in which family caps were found to affect fertility behavior, but this effect was conditioned by a state’s willingness to u…
Beyond Intention to Treat Analysis in Welfare-to-Work Studies: The Efficacy of Labor Force Attachment, Human Capital Investment and Combined Strategies for Self-Sufficiency
Using a sample of 2072 women who participated in New Jersey's Family Development Program experiment during 1992–1996, we compare three welfare-to-work strategieslabor force attachment (LFA), human capital investment (HCI), and a mixed strategyemploying traditional effectiveness analysis within an experimental design and an efficacy approach which controls for selective participation by experimental and control subjects. Controlling for selective …
Welfare Reform and Child Fostering: Pinpointing Affected Child Populations
Objective. The objective of our research is to examine the impact of New Jersey's welfare reform called the Family Development Program (FDP) on child fostering among children on welfare. Methods. The research and analytical methods we use include an experimental design and probit regressions. Results. Our results show that FDP impacts are confined to children of short‐term welfare recipients (new cases) but affects both African‐American and white…
Do Family Caps on Welfare Affect Births Among Welfare Recipients? Reconciling Efficacy and Effectiveness Estimates of Impact through a Blended Design Strategy
This paper proposes a blended experimental and quasi-experimental research strategy which we believe will help improve the external validity of evaluations of welfare reform and other social policies. We draw upon data from New Jersey’s imposition of a family cap, where welfare benefits instead of increasing remained the same for women who conceive and bear a child while on public assistance. We directly compare estimates of the policy’s effectiv…
Children's living arrangements from a social policy implementation perspective
New Jersey’s Family Cap and Welfare Births: An Examination of Racial Differences in Fertility Within the Framework of Proximate Determinants
New Jersey’s family cap policy was designed to encourage responsible childbearing among welfare recipients by placing an economic disincentive on births conceived while the mother was receiving welfare. In this study, we use data from an experiment conducted with 8,400 women from October 1992 to December 1996 to determine which of the proximate determinants (abortion, contraception, or family planning visits) are critical in women’s decisions to …
The use of client surveys to gauge the threat of contamination in welfare reform experiments
This paper examines the type of evidence policy analysts have used to identify the presence and magnitude of contamination in welfare reform experiments. Peter Rossi's critique of the New Jersey Family Development Program evaluation motivates the following discussion. In this critique Rossi and others contend that client misperception about experimental control‐group assignment resulted in contamination that negates reported treatment effectivene…
Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects
Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is co…
Relying on Surveys to Understand Abortion Behavior: Some Cautionary Evidence
Objectives. The reliability of abortion self-reports has raised questions about the general usefulness of surveys in research about abortion behavior; however, the extent of underreporting remains a subject of some debate. This study sought to examine abortion reporting in a sample of welfare mothers and to determine factors in underreporting. Methods. In New Jersey, which covers abortions requested by welfare recipients under its Medicaid progra…
Modeling the reliability and predictive validity of risk assessment in child protective services
Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects
Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is co…
Evaluating Welfare Reform Waivers Under Section 1115
Beginning in 1962, Section 1115 of the Social Security Act allowed the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to waive specific provisions of the act within individual states, allowing them to implement welfare experiments or demonstration projects to reduce welfare recipiency, ease transitions into the labor market for welfare clients, or otherwise advance the objectives of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The per…
The use of client surveys to gauge the threat of contamination in welfare reform experiments
This paper examines the type of evidence policy analysts have used to identify the presence and magnitude of contamination in welfare reform experiments. Peter Rossi's critique of the New Jersey Family Development Program evaluation motivates the following discussion. In this critique Rossi and others contend that client misperception about experimental control‐group assignment resulted in contamination that negates reported treatment effectivene…
University-community partnering using a targeted mutual-interests approach
In this paper, we describe a six-year effort to create a university-community partnership in a disadvantaged neighborhood bordering Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We discuss the traditional community research and development (TCR&D) model employed by universities and how assumptions made by the university about the capacities of community brokering agents can significantly influence both the time and trajectory of partnership bu…
Prediction accuracy of the Washington and Illinois risk assessment instruments: An application of receiver operating characteristic curve analysis
In recent years many child protective services (CPS) agencies have used structured risk assessment to streamline and rationalize case identification and management in a resource-depleted environment. Empirical evidence of risk assessment's capacity to predict child maltreatment has been limited to tests of single instruments. This article compares the predictive performances of the Illinois CANTS 17B and the Washington State Risk Matrix on a samp…
The crucial role played by social outrage in efforts to reform child protective services
How Family Caps Work: Evidence from a National Study
Many experts consider family caps to be the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor unmarried women. Despite the operation of such caps in 23 states, research reports mixed findings on the policy’s effectiveness in reducing nonmarital births. This article presents results from a national study in which family caps were found to affect fertility behavior, but this effect was conditioned by a state’s willingness to u…
The Future of the Family Cap: Fertility Effects 18 Years Post-Implementation
Family caps are the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor, unmarried women. These policies generate a great deal of controversy due to the groups of women they target, the mechanisms through which they operate, and the effects they purport to produce. This article presents results from a national study with 18 years of post–family cap data. We find that family caps reduce nonmarital births by about 2 per 1,000 an…
The Effect of Child Support Enforcement on Abortion in the U nited S tates
OBJECTIVES: This project aims to answer a critically important question of public policy: Does effective child support enforcement lead to a change in the incidence of abortion across the United States? METHODS: Using state-level data collected from 1978–2003 from a variety of sources, we employ fixed effects regression analysis to examine whether financial security as measured by five types of child support enforcement effectiveness impacts abor…
Do Family Caps on Welfare Affect Births Among Welfare Recipients? Reconciling Efficacy and Effectiveness Estimates of Impact through a Blended Design Strategy
This paper proposes a blended experimental and quasi-experimental research strategy which we believe will help improve the external validity of evaluations of welfare reform and other social policies. We draw upon data from New Jersey’s imposition of a family cap, where welfare benefits instead of increasing remained the same for women who conceive and bear a child while on public assistance. We directly compare estimates of the policy’s effectiv…
Modeling all-cause mortality: Projections of the impact of smoking cessation based on the NHEFS. NHANES I Epidemiologic Follow-up Study
OBJECTIVES: A model that relates clinical risk factors to subsequent mortality was used to simulate the impact of smoking cessation. METHODS: Survivor functions derived from multivariate hazard regressions fitted to data from the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) Epidemiologic Followup Study, a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of US adults, were used to project deaths from all causes. RESULTS: Validat…
The Association Between Black vs. White Race and 30-Day Hospitalization Among People Diagnosed with Covid-19 Within an Integrated Care Setting: A Cohort Study
Social outrage and organizational behavior: A national study of child protective service decisions
The Price Effects of Family Caps on Fertility Decisions of Poor Women
Family Caps have been a popular welfare reform policy designed to discourage women on welfare from bearing additional children. It has been thought that the principal mechanism through which a Cap achieves its objective of lower birth rates is the financial pressure placed on women by the denial of cash benefits. Our study uses instrumental variables Probit modeling to directly measure the contribution that price makes to Cap impact on births. We…
Experimental evidence of welfare reform impact on clinical anxiety and depression levels among poor women
Children's living arrangements from a social policy implementation perspective
Prediction accuracy of the Washington and Illinois risk assessment instruments: An application of receiver operating characteristic curve analysis
In recent years many child protective services (CPS) agencies have used structured risk assessment to streamline and rationalize case identification and management in a resource-depleted environment. Empirical evidence of risk assessment's capacity to predict child maltreatment has been limited to tests of single instruments. This article compares the predictive performances of the Illinois CANTS 17B and the Washington State Risk Matrix on a samp…
Modeling all-cause mortality: Projections of the impact of smoking cessation based on the NHEFS. NHANES I Epidemiologic Follow-up Study
OBJECTIVES: A model that relates clinical risk factors to subsequent mortality was used to simulate the impact of smoking cessation. METHODS: Survivor functions derived from multivariate hazard regressions fitted to data from the first National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES I) Epidemiologic Followup Study, a longitudinal survey of a representative sample of US adults, were used to project deaths from all causes. RESULTS: Validat…
Modeling the reliability and predictive validity of risk assessment in child protective services
Evaluating Welfare Reform Waivers Under Section 1115
Beginning in 1962, Section 1115 of the Social Security Act allowed the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services to waive specific provisions of the act within individual states, allowing them to implement welfare experiments or demonstration projects to reduce welfare recipiency, ease transitions into the labor market for welfare clients, or otherwise advance the objectives of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. The per…
Relying on Surveys to Understand Abortion Behavior: Some Cautionary Evidence
Objectives. The reliability of abortion self-reports has raised questions about the general usefulness of surveys in research about abortion behavior; however, the extent of underreporting remains a subject of some debate. This study sought to examine abortion reporting in a sample of welfare mothers and to determine factors in underreporting. Methods. In New Jersey, which covers abortions requested by welfare recipients under its Medicaid progra…
New Jersey’s Family Cap and Welfare Births: An Examination of Racial Differences in Fertility Within the Framework of Proximate Determinants
New Jersey’s family cap policy was designed to encourage responsible childbearing among welfare recipients by placing an economic disincentive on births conceived while the mother was receiving welfare. In this study, we use data from an experiment conducted with 8,400 women from October 1992 to December 1996 to determine which of the proximate determinants (abortion, contraception, or family planning visits) are critical in women’s decisions to …
The use of client surveys to gauge the threat of contamination in welfare reform experiments
This paper examines the type of evidence policy analysts have used to identify the presence and magnitude of contamination in welfare reform experiments. Peter Rossi's critique of the New Jersey Family Development Program evaluation motivates the following discussion. In this critique Rossi and others contend that client misperception about experimental control‐group assignment resulted in contamination that negates reported treatment effectivene…
Family Cap and Nonmarital Fertility: The Racial Conditioning of Policy Effects
Using an experimental design, this research examines the effect of the nation's first family cap on the births, abortions, and contraception use of over 8,000 women receiving public assistance in New Jersey. The family cap denies additional cash benefits to children conceived while the mother is receiving public assistance. Our research shows that a targeted welfare benefit manipulation does influence fertility behavior; however, the effect is co…
Do Family Caps on Welfare Affect Births Among Welfare Recipients? Reconciling Efficacy and Effectiveness Estimates of Impact through a Blended Design Strategy
This paper proposes a blended experimental and quasi-experimental research strategy which we believe will help improve the external validity of evaluations of welfare reform and other social policies. We draw upon data from New Jersey’s imposition of a family cap, where welfare benefits instead of increasing remained the same for women who conceive and bear a child while on public assistance. We directly compare estimates of the policy’s effectiv…
Children's living arrangements from a social policy implementation perspective
Beyond Intention to Treat Analysis in Welfare-to-Work Studies: The Efficacy of Labor Force Attachment, Human Capital Investment and Combined Strategies for Self-Sufficiency
Using a sample of 2072 women who participated in New Jersey's Family Development Program experiment during 1992–1996, we compare three welfare-to-work strategieslabor force attachment (LFA), human capital investment (HCI), and a mixed strategyemploying traditional effectiveness analysis within an experimental design and an efficacy approach which controls for selective participation by experimental and control subjects. Controlling for selective …
Welfare Reform and Child Fostering: Pinpointing Affected Child Populations
Objective. The objective of our research is to examine the impact of New Jersey's welfare reform called the Family Development Program (FDP) on child fostering among children on welfare. Methods. The research and analytical methods we use include an experimental design and probit regressions. Results. Our results show that FDP impacts are confined to children of short‐term welfare recipients (new cases) but affects both African‐American and white…
How Family Caps Work: Evidence from a National Study
Many experts consider family caps to be the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor unmarried women. Despite the operation of such caps in 23 states, research reports mixed findings on the policy’s effectiveness in reducing nonmarital births. This article presents results from a national study in which family caps were found to affect fertility behavior, but this effect was conditioned by a state’s willingness to u…
The Price Effects of Family Caps on Fertility Decisions of Poor Women
Family Caps have been a popular welfare reform policy designed to discourage women on welfare from bearing additional children. It has been thought that the principal mechanism through which a Cap achieves its objective of lower birth rates is the financial pressure placed on women by the denial of cash benefits. Our study uses instrumental variables Probit modeling to directly measure the contribution that price makes to Cap impact on births. We…
Experimental evidence of welfare reform impact on clinical anxiety and depression levels among poor women
Welfare reform's impact on caseload decline in the United States: An application of latent trajectory model
This paper examines the effect of welfare reform policies on caseload changes during 1992–2005. Using state-level panel data we estimate latent trajectory models to determine if welfare reform has contributed to changes in the trajectories of caseload growth (decline) beyond what would have naturally occurred through the passage of time. Our results show that (a) states vary considerably in both their mean initial level as well as linear trajecto…
The crucial role played by social outrage in efforts to reform child protective services
University-community partnering using a targeted mutual-interests approach
In this paper, we describe a six-year effort to create a university-community partnership in a disadvantaged neighborhood bordering Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. We discuss the traditional community research and development (TCR&D) model employed by universities and how assumptions made by the university about the capacities of community brokering agents can significantly influence both the time and trajectory of partnership bu…
A Latent Growth Curve Model of Nonmarital Births, Abortions, and Pregnancies: Did Welfare Reform Play a Role in Changing the Trajectories
This article uses latent growth models to examine the effect of three welfare reform policies, viz., family caps, stricter work requirements, and time limits on fertility outcomes. The study is the first to extend the application of this statistical modeling approach to an examination of reproductive behavior. Using state level panel data for 1992–2005 we attempt to determine if welfare reform has contributed to changes in the trajectories of non…
The Effect of Child Support Enforcement on Abortion in the U nited S tates
OBJECTIVES: This project aims to answer a critically important question of public policy: Does effective child support enforcement lead to a change in the incidence of abortion across the United States? METHODS: Using state-level data collected from 1978–2003 from a variety of sources, we employ fixed effects regression analysis to examine whether financial security as measured by five types of child support enforcement effectiveness impacts abor…
Protecting Children in the Age of Outrage: A New Perspective on Child Protective Services Reform
This book proposes what, to many professionals in the child welfare field, will appear a radically different explanation for society's decisions to protect children from harm and for the significant drop in substantiated child abuse numbers. At the center of this conceptual and analytic approach is the contention that social outrage emanating from horrific and often sensationalized cases of child maltreatment plays a major role in CPS decision ma…
The Future of the Family Cap: Fertility Effects 18 Years Post-Implementation
Family caps are the one welfare reform explicitly designed to reduce birth rates among poor, unmarried women. These policies generate a great deal of controversy due to the groups of women they target, the mechanisms through which they operate, and the effects they purport to produce. This article presents results from a national study with 18 years of post–family cap data. We find that family caps reduce nonmarital births by about 2 per 1,000 an…
Social outrage and organizational behavior: A national study of child protective service decisions
Conceptualizing and testing the vicious cycle in child protective services: The critical role played by child maltreatment fatalities
Sleep and Economic Status Are Linked to Daily Life Stress in African-Born Blacks Living in America
To identify determinants of daily life stress in Africans in America, 156 African-born Blacks (Age: 40 ± 10 years (mean ± SD), range 22-65 years) who came to the United States as adults (age ≥ 18 years) were asked about stress, sleep, behavior and socioeconomic status. Daily life stress and sleep quality were assessed with the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), respectively. High-stress was defined by the thre…
Economics (20 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Welfare (16 works) · Demography (15 works) · Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics (15 works) · Medicine (15 works) · Demographic economics (13 works) · Population (12 works)