Bishop, John H. 1980. "Jobs, Cash Transfers, and Marital Instability: A Review and Synthesis of the Evidence." Journal of Human Resources 15(3):301-334.

Expanding welfare benefits to include two-parent families has long been considered an option for a public policy designed to strengthen family units. The negative income tax experiments employed this option, and it was found that the experimental group experienced 50 percent higher marital instability than the control group that was eligible for the current set of income-maintenance programs--AFDC and Food Stamps. Marital instability increases even when an experimental plan was no more generous than AFDC for the splitting wife. The conclusion must be either that because of differences in information, stigma, or transaction costs, the experiments produced more powerful independence effects than an equivalent amount of AFDC, or that receiving NIT payments somehow reduced the attractiveness of the married state by calling into question the success of the husband as provider. These findings suggest that, if strengthening marriages is a public-policy objective, two-parent families would be better aided by wage subsidies that reduce the unemployment of family heads and raise the earnings of the family's working members.

The author is Project Associate, Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison. I wish to thank Lyle Groeneveld, Douglas Wolf, Gary Burtless, Maurice MacDonald, and Philip Robins provided helpful comments on earlier drafts. The opinions expressed and any errors are solely the responsibility of the author.

© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

US ISSN 0022-166X

Return to JHR Home Page