Plotnick, Robert. 1983. "Turnover in the AFDC Population: An Event History Analysis." Journal of Human Resources 18(1):65-81.

The control group of families with female heads, from the Denver Income Maintenance Experiment, is utilized in this analysis of AFDC turnover. This study uses event history techniques, a methodology that is more appropriate for exploring welfare dynamics than the logit approach of earlier work. Increases in age and the wage have significant, negative effects on the rate of entering AFDC. A higher guarantee raises this rate significantly. Age and the guarantee have significant effects, with opposite signs, on the exit rate. Other variables are not systematically related to turnover. The estimates are applied to projected changes in lengths of time spent on and off AFDC and in AFDC caseloads due to changes in the explanatory variables.

The author is a member of the Economics faculty, Dartmouth College.
I thank, with the usual caveats, Richard Butler, Richard Coe, Sheldon Danziger, Robert Hutchens, Edwin Hutchins, George Jakubson, Maurice MacDonald, Irv Piliavin, Nancy Tuma, and the referees for helpful discussions and comments on earlier drafts, and Michael Massagli for research assistance. Ken Burdett and Nicholas Kiefer kindly shared their data. This work was supported by funds granted to the Institute for Research on Poverty and the Center for Demography and Ecology, both at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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

US ISSN 0022-166X

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