Blau, Francine D., Lawrence M. Kahn, and Jane Waldfogel. 2004. "The Impact of Welfare Benefits on Single Motherhood and Headship of Young Women: Evidence from the Census." Journal of Human Resources 39(2): 382-404.

This paper uses data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 Censuses to investigate the impact of welfare benefits across Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) on the incidence of single motherhood and headship for young women. A contribution of the paper is the inclusion of both MSA fixed effects and MSA-specific time trends to account for fixed and trending unmeasured factors that could influence both welfare benefit levels and family formation. In such a model, we find no effect of welfare benefits on single motherhood for whites or blacks, and a positive effect of welfare benefits on single headship only for blacks.

Francine D. Blau is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University, Research Associate of the NBER, and Research Fellow of CESifo. Lawrence M. Kahn is a professor of labor economics and collective bargaining at Cornell University, and Research Fellow of CESifo. Jane Waldfogel is an associate professor of social work and public affairs at Columbia University. This research was supported by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation. Deborah Anderson, John Cheslock, Wen-Jui Han, Elizabeth Inez Johnson, Brian Levine, Joan Moriarty, and Andre Souza provided excellent research assistance. The authors are also grateful to Al Anderson for help with the Census extracts and to Robert Moffitt and Hilary Hoynes for providing us with data on welfare benefits. Special thanks are due to John Bound and Harry Holzer for the considerable help in making some key data on matching Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) across Censuses available to us. The authors are also indebted to two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning October 2004 through September 2007 from Lawrence M. Kahn, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 264 Ives Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901.