Introduction

Can economic incentives be used to affect marriage behavior and slow the growth of single-parent families? This paper provides new evidence on the effects of welfare benefit incentives on the marital decisions of poor women. Exogenous variation in welfare program parameters arises from a randomized experiment carried out in California. Whereas previous studies have measured women’s responses to...

Most work by economists has been inconclusive when seeking a consistent relationship between income-support programs (like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC)) and births to unwed women (or, as the literature traditionally terms it, illegitimacy). But a recent study (Kimenyi and Mbaku (1995)) reports a large, positive and statistically-significant relationship when data are weighted ...

Claims that states which offer generous welfare benefits attract the poor and that some states pay low benefits intending to drive the poor away are neither uncommon nor entirely unfounded. This paper employs a two player (state) generalized game to model states' choice of a benefit level in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program. Migration by the poor in response to interst...

Aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) began with the Social Security Act, passed 50 years ago to provide what President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a “safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this manmade world of ours. ” In creating the program, originally called aid to dependent children, the .Federal Government for the first time accepted responsibility fo...

This article reports the results of a survey of State Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) rules regarding the treatment of unrelated cohabitors in households containing AFDC units. We examine State treatment of cash and in-kind contributions by cohabitors and find that the AFDC grant is usually not affected in the cohabitor makes in-kind contributions toward food and shelter expenses...

A large body of empirical research has concluded that, at least during the 1950s and 1960s, the effect of welfare benefits on migration differed significantly by racial group, with blacks being attracted by and whites repulsed by areas that provided high welfare benefits. This study revisits the issue of racial differences in attractiveness to interregional differences in welfare benefits, usin...

Recently the Social Security Administration was given responsibility for the administration of the aid to families with dependent children (AFDC) program. The major source of national data describing AFDC recipients is a series of studies of the families that receive payments under the program. Eleven such studies have been conducted on an intermittent basis since the program began in 1936. The...

In this chapter, we describe several aspects of the labor market performance of a sample of fathers of children whose mothers participate in Wisconsin Works (W-2). We track labor market outcomes for these fathers during calendar years 1998 and 1999, after the AFDC program was replaced by the W-2 program. Welfare reform in this period had direct and dramatic consequences for resident parents on ...

Because person-level data are not currently available at the Federal level, many questions regarding the use and expenditures of Medicaid services remain unanswered. This article demonstrates the capability of State Medicaid Management Information Systems (MMIS) to provide data that can address a variety of Medicaid program issues at both the State and Federal levels. Using data from the Tennes...