Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A question of long-standing research and policy interest is whether the U.S. welfare system discourages marriage and encourages single motherhood. In this study we provide a new examination of the incentive effects of welfare rules on marriage and cohabitation among low-income women. Summaries of the early research (e.g. Moffitt, 1998) on the Aid to Families with Dependence Children (AFDC) program showed quite weak evidence for the hypothesis, albeit with a wide range of estimates across different studies consistent with the existence of a nonzero positive effect on single motherhood but one which is probably small in magnitude and hard to detect. The more recent literature (e.g. Acs and Nelson, 2004; Bitler et al., 2004, Bitler et al., 2006, Dunifon etl. al, 2009, and Blau and van der Klaauw, 2013) has focused on the effect of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program and on the policy changes that preceded it (“waivers”). These studies, some of which have also examined cohabitation as an outcome, have generally found mixed effects, with a few studies finding some significant effects on family structure but many finding no effects or even effects with counterintuitive signs.

In this study, we emphasize that the eligibility and benefit rules of AFDC and TANF are based more on the biological relationship between the children and any male in the household than on marriage or cohabitation per se. For our analysis, we use data from the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP) for the years 1996 (the interview took place just before implementation of the law), 2001, 2004, and 2008. This time frame allows us to look for effects over a longer period than most past studies cited above. The SIPP is a particularly good data source for this analysis because it contains a household relationship matrix identifying the biological relationships between the children and all of the adults in the household. Taking advantage of this detailed family information, we examine the effect of the 1990s welfare reforms on family structure outcomes that accurately match the rules of the welfare programs. Using data from a year prior to the reform and from several years after it, we find that pre-TANF waiver policies had modest effects in increasing rates of single motherhood and decreasing rates of marriage to men who were biological fathers of the children. These effects were magnified in states which enacted particularly harsh work-related policies after 1996. Our results demonstrate the importance of distinguishing family structure by biological status for understanding the effects of welfare reforms.