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Title: Do Welfare Programs Affect Schooling and Work Patterns of Young Black Men and Women?
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Lerman, Robert I. |
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Do Welfare Programs Affect Schooling and Work Patterns of Young Black Men and Women? Presented: Cambridge, MA, Conference on Inner City Black Youth Unemployment, August 1983 Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: Author Keyword(s): Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); Family Income; Family Influences; Inner-City; Parents, Single; Poverty; Racial Differences; Transfers, Financial; Transfers, Public; Welfare Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper discusses the role of income transfer programs in searching for explanations of the poor labor market outcomes for black and low income youth. For young black men, the significant predicted welfare effects indicated that much of the negative outcomes are actually due to the welfare experience. However, the larger and more systematically significant effects of actual as opposed to predicted welfare suggests that some negative youth outcomes are attributable to unmeasured attitudes and other characteristics associated both with welfare participation and low employment related capacities of the youths' family. Young black women interact with welfare programs in a much larger and more direct way than do young black men. Effects on young men are found to take place mainly as a result of benefits received by parents or other relatives. In contrast, young women seem to be affected both indirectly as a result of a parent's or relative's benefit and directly when they become an unmarried mother and head of their own welfare family at the time of normal entry into the labor market. The empirical results show clear negative effects from welfare programs on the employment and earnings of young black women. Unlike the case of young men, it is possible to identify mechanisms through which welfare programs influence young women. The evidence goes beyond welfare's influence on young women to become unmarried mothers. Even among unmarried mothers, the receipt of welfare benefits tends to reduce employment and earnings. A measure of the young women's employability, predicted welfare, exerted a substantial negative impact on the labor market performance of unmarried mothers. Racial differentials in the share of young living with a family on welfare appear quite large. With 20-30 percent of black youth and only 5 percent of white youth interacting with the welfare system, any welfare effects on youth employment could account for a significant part of the overall and surprisingly high racial differentials in employment levels. |
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Bibliography Citation
Lerman, Robert I. "Do Welfare Programs Affect Schooling and Work Patterns of Young Black Men and Women?" Presented: Cambridge, MA, Conference on Inner City Black Youth Unemployment, August 1983. |