Title: Did Welfare Reform Work for Everyone? A Look at Young Single Mothers
Abstract: Passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996 marked the most far-reaching reform of the U.S. welfare system since the 1930s. Advocates for lowincome groups, front-line service providers, and many policymakers expressed serious reservations about the legislation. Their concerns largely revolved around how the movement from Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), a cash transfer system with no time limits, to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a work-based program with strict time limits, would affect the household incomes of the target population of impoverished single mothers. But fears that families headed by single mothers would sink deeper into poverty turned out to be unfounded. Following the reforms, welfare caseloads declined rapidly, and employment and household incomes of single mothers rose. Importantly, these improved outcomes largely survived the challenges posed by the 2001 recession, suggesting that the initial successes were not simply due to a booming economy. Now, more than a decade after passage of the legislation, policymakers and academics alike view welfare reform as a success. Few experts question whether the reform accomplished its stated goals of moving single mothers into the labor market and keeping them out of the cash welfare system. (See Blank 2006 and Moffitt 2008 for excellent reviews of the literature evaluating the success and failures of the reforms.) Although employment and income data point to the overall success of welfare reform, important questions remain, including the extent to which aggregate improvement may hide problems among important subgroups. In other words, how much does the experience of the average single mother accurately reflect that of more vulnerable single mothers, such as those with serious barriers to employment? This issue is especially critical now that we are in a deep economic recession. Research has shown that such downturns can have disproportionately negative effects on those least attached to the labor market (Hoynes 2000). In this Economic Letter we examine how one particularly vulnerable group, young single mothers age 18 to 24, fared in the aftermath of welfare reform. We choose this group because they may face especially difficult challenges in finding employment due to low educational attainment and lack of work experience. Yet data show that, like the broader population of single mothers, single mothers in this age group had lower welfare dependency, greater workforce participation, and higher household income in
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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