The persistence of disadvantage across generations is a central concern for social policy in the United States. While an extensive literature has focused on income mobility, much less is known about the persistence of material hardship. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the intergenerational persistence of food insecurity.
We investigate how length of time on welfare during childhood affects economic outcomes in early adulthood. Using intergenerationally linked mother-child pairs from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we adopt a nonlinear difference-in-differences framework using the 1990s welfare reform to estimate average and quantile treatment effects on intensity of welfare use and earnings in adulthood.
We investigate the intersection of family size, food security, and the efficacy of public benefits, especially with respect to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Food security literature pays scant attention to the role of number of children in a household – an important dimension for understanding family resource and food assistance adequacy in the context of child well-being.
We estimate the effect of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation and related economic outcomes using a long panel of mother-daughter pairs over the survey period 1968-2013 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Because states implemented welfare reform at different times starting in 1992, the cross-state variation over time permits us to quasi-experimentally separate out the effect of mothers’ welfare participation during childhood on daughters’ economic outcomes in adulthood in the pre- and post-welfare reform periods.
Recent studies have used a distributional analysis of welfare reform experiments suggesting that some individuals reduce hours in order to opt into welfare, an example of behavioral-induced participation. Using data on Connecticut’s Jobs First experiment, we find no evidence of behavioral-induced participation at the highest conditional quantiles of earnings. We offer a simple explanation for this: women assigned to Jobs First incur welfare participation costs to labor supply at higher earnings where the control group is welfare ineligible.