Bitler, Marianne P., Jonah B. Gelbach, and Hilary W. Hoynes. 2006. “Welfare Reform and Children’s Living Arrangements.” Journal of Human Resources 41(1): 1–27.
Little is known about welfare reform’s effects on family structure and children’s living arrangements, an important focus for reformers. Using March CPS data, we find that state welfare waivers are associated with children being less likely to live with unmarried parents, more likely to live with married parents, and more likely to live with neither parent. Children living with neither parent are living with grandparents or other relatives, or rarely, in foster care. The estimates vary somewhat by children’s race and ethnicity. Due to the limited variation in TANF’s implementation timing across states, we focus on the waiver results.
Marianne P. Bitler is a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, adjunct at the RAND Corporation, and an IZA affiliate. Jonah B. Gelbach is an associate professor of economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Hilary Hoynes is a professor of economics at University of California, Davis, and an NBER and IZA affiliate. Results discussed in this paper previously circulated under the title “The Impact of Welfare Reform on Living Arrangements” and supersede the results in that paper. They thank Ken Chay, Mary Daly, Keenan Dworak-Fisher, Bill Evans, Steven Haider, Judy Hellerstein, Jacob Klerman, Charles Michalopoulos, Ed Montgomery, Anne Polivka, Dan Rosenbaum, Seth Sanders, Bob Schoeni, Jay Stewart, Steve Stillman, Madeline Zavodny, and participants of the UC Davis Brown Bag, RAND Brown Bag, Bay Area Labor Economists Meeting, Southern Economics Association Meeting, and UC Santa Cruz, Cornell, Kentucky, Northwestern, University of Chicago, University of Maryland Labor/Public, Bureau of Labor Statistics, San Francisco State University, and Cornell Policy and Management seminars for their valuable comments. They also thank Aaron Yelowitz for providing data on Medicaid expansions. Excellent research assistance was provided by Alana Harris, Gillian van Oosten, and Jared Rodecker. Bitler gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Aging, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the RAND Corporation. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning August 2006 through July 2009 from Hilary Hoynes, Department of Economics, UC Davis, hwhoynes@ucdavis.edu.