Volume 31, Number 4 (Fall) 1996
Acs, Gregory. 1996. "The Impact of Welfare on Young Mother's
Subsequent Childbearing Decisions." Journal of Human Resources
31(4):898-915.
Politicians, the press, and the public have become increasingly worried about welfare becoming a ‘“lifestyle”’ in which women have multiple births both to increase their incomes and to prolong their stays on the welfare roles. Such concerns have given rise to policy proposals such as the “family cap” which would deny welfare recipients higher welfare payments if they have another child while on welfare. This paper examines the relationship between welfare and births to women who already have a child, using data on young mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). I find that variations in welfare benefit levels and the incremental benefit have no statistically significant impacts on the subsequent childbearing decisions of young mothers in general, nor on the subsequent childbearing decisions of women who received welfare in particular. Furthermore, mothers who received welfare to support their first children are no more likely to have additional children in any given year through the age of 23.
Gregory Acs is a Senior Research Associate at the Urban Institute. Support for this research was provided through the Small Grants Program of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. The author gratefully acknowledges the capable research assistance provided by David Dickinson and production assistance provided by Sharon Hilliard. The paper benefited from the comments of Duncan Chaplin, Rebecca Clark, Maria Enchautegui, Sharon Long, Pamela Loprest, John Marcotte, Robert Moffitt, Robert Plotnick, Daniel Meyer, Steve Sandell, and Felicity Skidmore. The author also would like to thank seminar participants at William and Mary, the Urban Institute, and the Institute for Research on Poverty as well as IRP’s grant reviewers for their helpful suggestions. All errors are the responsibility of the author alone. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in April 1997 through March 2000 from the author at The Urban Institute, 2100 M Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20037.
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