Bradbury, Katharine. 1978. "Income Maintenance Alternatives and Family Composition: An Analysis of Price Effects." Journal of Human Resources 13(3):305-331.

There is some current public concern about the effects of welfare programs on participants' decisions about marriage and divorce or having children. This paper discusses one way in which family composition may be affected by income maintenance program benefits, through what are called "price effects." After discussing price incentive hypothetically, the paper presents measures of the price incentives in our current welfare system and in the cash component of President Carter's welfare-reform proposal. No income maintenance program can be entirely marriage-neutral, but it is found that the reform generally reduces the destabilizing incentives of the current system.

The author is Research Associate, The Brookings Institution. Research described in this paper was supported by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare pursuant to provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. The author wishes to thank Irv Garfinkel, Sheldon Danziger, and the editor for helpful discussions. They are not responsible for any remaining errors. The views expressed in this paper are the author's and should not be ascribed to the officers, trustees, or other staff members of the Brookings Institution or the Poverty Institute.

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