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Acknowledgments The idea for this book came from Bryna Sanger of the Milano New School for Management and Urban Policy, whom I contacted after reading her book The Welfare Marketplace. After explaining my research interest in the intersection of poverty policy and public management, she suggested that I focus on performance issues—in particular, why some welfare-to-work programs are more effective than others. She also suggested that I contact New York City’s welfare department (the Human Resources Administration or HRA), which was using random assignment to place welfare recipients into employment programs, creating a natural experiment that had not yet been carefully studied. Both were terrifically valuable suggestions. My research would not have progressed, moreover, without Swati Desai, HRA’s Executive Deputy Commissioner at the time (now a professor at Columbia University), who wanted to shed new light on program performance and secured HRA authorization for me to study New York City’s programs. Assistant Deputy Commissioner Lisa Garabedian also provided valuable help in many ways, from setting up my program visits to helping me understand the structure of HRA’s administrative data. This book has benefited enormously from the comments and suggestions of others. First and foremost are my colleagues at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Mary Jo Bane provided guidance and feedback throughout the research process, including key suggestions that shaped this study. She has been an important mentor to me. Jeff Liebman gave very useful feedback in terms of both methodology and presentation. And David Ellwood helped me think through the implications of my findings. At Harvard University, the Inequality and Social Policy Program (funded by the National Science Foundation) and the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy provided financial support for this research. My thanks go as well to Larry Mead of New York University who helped me formulate the study’s design and gave me feedback on the results. His methodological work on performance analysis is a basis for this study. Bruce Ross-Larson helped me turn a more academic-oriented piece of research into a book for publication. A special thanks to Kevin Hollenbeck at the Upjohn Institute and three anonymous readers who provided extremely useful suggestions on the book’s first draft. Carolyn Heinrich and her colleagues at the La Follette School of Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin also provided insightful comments on my research at a presentation there in early 2010. The book was copyedited by Bob Wathen, whose careful and thoughtful editing xiii improved the manuscript significantly. Rich Wyrwa at the Upjohn Institute helped shepherd the book to publication. My sincere thanks also go to the leaders of the 26 employment programs in New York City that are the focus of this volume. Their openness to having a researcher observe their programs and interview them and their staffs was critical to this research. Finally, I would also like to acknowledge two scholars who have played important roles in my life and who therefore influenced this volume. Bob Behn at the Kennedy School inspired me, during graduate school, to add public management as one of my main research interests. His guidance and insights over the years have been invaluable. And Rob Hollister of Swarthmore College inspired me, in college, to become a poverty researcher. Since then Rob has been an important guiding influence to me, with his commitment to rigorous research, his sense of humor, and his generous spirit. xiv ...

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