The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage; the pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided...

We investigate the impact of welfare reform on health insurance coverage and healthcare utilization of single women aged 20–45, using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We present estimates from both difference-in-difference models and...

Little is known about welfare reform’s effects on family structure and children’s living arrangements, an important focus for reformers. Using March CPS data, we find that state welfare waivers are associated with children being less likely to live with unmarried parents, more likely to live...

The goal of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) was to end the dependency of needy parents on government benefits, in part by promoting marriage. The pre-reform welfare system was widely believed to discourage marriage because it primarily provided...

Relatively little is known about the impact of welfare reform on children's living arrangements, which was an important focus of reformers. We use data from the March CPS to examine this question. Our findings suggest three main conclusions. First, welfare reform in some cases has had large...

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using randomassignment data from Connecticut?s Jobs First...