Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since the passage of PRWORA in 1996, millions of single mothers left welfare and got off public assistance by gaining employment. Yet, a growing body of literature is concerned about those women who left TANF but did not find employment. Literature finds that those who left welfare without gaining employment find themselves in economic and material hardship. These women are called as “disconnected” implying that they neither receive TANF nor have any earnings from employment (Blank & Kovak, 2009; Loprest, 2003). In 2008, approximately 1.2 million women were disconnected at point in time (Loprest and Austin, 2011).

Current literature primarily focuses on understanding the dynamics and coping strategies of these women who live at the economic margin of the society. Though literature discusses the extent of this phenomenon along with how such disconnection affects material hardship, literature does not explore those material hardship questions in details. In this study, I focus specifically on the connection between food security and disconnected women. I ask the following research question, “to what extent do disconnected women experience food insecurity?”

To answer this question, I use the food security supplement from Current Population Survey (CPS) for the years 1995-2016. I define disconnected mothers as single women with dependent children who are not employed, do not receive cash assistance from TANF and have income up to 150% of FPL. I use multinomial logit to estimate the following equation:

FS_it = β₀ + β₁ X_it + β₂ Z_it++ β₃ S_it +µ_it where

FS_it denotes the food security status of a single mother (i) in the year (t). It is divided into three categories: Marginal food security, Low food security and Very low food security. X_it is the disconnection status of a single mother (i) in the year (t) and the main variable of interest, which is equal to 1 if disconnected and 0 if not disconnected. Z is the vector of individual characteristics; S is the vector of state level characteristics, µ_it is the error term.

Since it is the 21^st anniversary of PRWORA, exploring the effect of PRWORA on a population that left welfare without finding employment is important to understand the effect of the reform on this population. The results from this analysis will be helpful for policymakers to understand if social policy reforms such as the welfare reform are leaving behind vulnerable populations that may need consistent support to find self-sufficiency.