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Title: Welfare Policy and Child Welfare
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Currie, Janet Thomas, Duncan |
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Welfare Policy and Child Welfare Presented: Washington, DC, Population Association of America Meetings, March 1997 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); Child Health; Children, Well-Being; Cognitive Development; Food Stamps (see Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program); Heterogeneity; Modeling; Siblings; Transfers, Financial; Transfers, Public; Welfare Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Even as welfare reforms are enacted, there is little scientific evidence about the impact of income transfer programs on one of their key targets: children at risk. This paper attempts to fill that gap by investigating the impact of parental participation in these programs on the well-being of their children. The focus is on the protective effect of income received from AFDC and Food Stamps on the health and cognitive development of young children. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we examine the effects of participation in welfare programs and the income received from those programs on child welfare. To address the fact that welfare participants are not randomly drawn from the population, we treat program participation as a choice made by mothers and compare the impact of participation on siblings. Failure to account for unobserved heterogeneity in this way turns out to be key and leads to the inference that welfare experience causes children to be worse off. Moreover, simply comparing whether a child has been on welfare with a sibling who has not does not capture the diversity of experiences. It is when we turn to time-specific models of welfare experiences and also compare the effect of welfare income with other resources that the effects on child well-being are clearest. There appear to be significant benefits to those children who have short spells on welfare at critical times in their lives and these benefits appear to be long-lasting. |
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Bibliography Citation
Currie, Janet and Duncan Thomas. "Welfare Policy and Child Welfare." Presented: Washington, DC, Population Association of America Meetings, March 1997. |