Volume 35, Number 3 (Summer) 2000
Dooley, Martin, Stéphane Gascon, Pierre Lefebvre, and Philip Merrigan. 2000. "Lone Female Headship and Welfare Policy in Canada." Journal of Human Resources 35(3):587-602.
The principal qualifying condition for welfare in Canada, unlike the United States, is financial need - there are no demographic criteria. We use a time-series of annual, national cross-sections for the period 1981 through 1993 to estimate a model of lone-female headship. Our findings do not support the hypothesis that welfare benefit levels for one-parent and two-parent families are important determinants of the likelihood that a Canadian woman is a lone mother. In all models with provincial fixed effects, the coefficients for welfare benefits are small, statistically insignificant, and often of the unexpected sign. We do find that the probability that a woman is a lone mother is generally associated in the expected fashion with her earnings capacity and the earnings capacity of her potential male partner, and with her age and schooling.
Martin Dooley is a professor of economics at McMaster University. Stéphane Gascon is an economist with Human Resources Development Canada. Pierre Lefebvre and Philip Merrigan are professors of economics at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The authors benefitted from the comments of two anonymous referees, Guy Lacroix, Bernard Fortin, Robert Moffitt, and workshops at McMaster University and Université du Québec à Montréal. The financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canadian International Labour Network, the FCAR Fund from the ministère de l'Education du Québec, and the CQRS Fund is gratefully acknowledged. The data used in this study are from public use files of the Survey of Consumer Finances. All computations were performed by the authors, and responsibility for the use and interpretation of these data are solely those of the authors. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not reflect the opinions of Human Resources Development Canada or of the federal government. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning January 2001 through January 2004 from Philip Merrigan, Economics, UQAM, C.P. 8888, Succ. "Centre-ville", Montreal, QC, Canada, H3C 3P8.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X