The Relationship between State Welfare Rules and Economic Disconnection among Low-Income Single Mothers

Abstract

The proportion of low-income single mothers who are disconnected, or not receiving public cash assistance or employment earnings, has increased since the 1996 US welfare reform legislation. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Welfare Rules Database, we use multilevel and multinomial logit models to examine the relationship between state welfare rules and the risk of disconnection. We find that women in states with lifetime limits of less than 60 months are more likely to be disconnected. More generous welfare benefits are associated with a lesser risk of disconnection, while diversion programs are associated with a greater risk of disconnection compared to welfare receipt but are not significant in comparison to employment. Our findings indicate that state rules matter and should be considered as a potential mechanism to change the dynamics of economic disconnection. introductionIn the late 1980s, welfare caseloads in the United States were suddenly rapidly increasing. Experts attributed the shift to a combination of economic, program, and demographic changes at the time ðCongressional Budget Office 1991Þ. The growing caseload became a catalyst for welfare reform and an important context for the resulting legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 ðPRWORAÞ. The accompanying rules include time limits and mandatory work participation Social Service Review (December 2015).

Moving In and Out of Welfare and Work: The Influence of Regional Socioeconomic Circumstances on Economic Disconnection Among Low-Income Single Mothers

“…Research on disconnection and household structure indicates that a majority of these other adults, whether related or unrelated, are also disconnected, disabled, or not sharing resources (Blank, 2007). Hetling, Kwon, and Saunders (2015) investigated the role of state welfare rules on the probability of disconnection separately for all disconnected mothers and then for those that live without other adults, and they found similar results. Research on the differences in resource sharing among married versus cohabitating households support the assumption that some cohabitating women have limited access to their partners' financial resources (Cross-Barnet, Cherlin, & Burton, 2008;Nock, 1995).…”

Examining Low-Income Single-Mother Families’ Experiences with Family Benefit Packages during and after the Great Recession in the United States

“…A work-based system particularly disadvantages low-income single mothers, who often hold low-wage, unstable jobs and shoulder both wage earning and caregiving responsibilities in their families. The erosion of public cash benefits since welfare reform has attracted scholarly attention to the "economic disconnection"-from both the welfare and labor market systems-of single-mother families and the negative impacts on children (Cancian et al 2014;Hetling et al 2015;Kwon and Meyer 2011;Seefeldt and Horowski 2012;Slack et al 2014). A work-based system imperils single mothers in economic hardship in periods when work is scarce, such as the recent Great Recession (GR, 2007(GR, -2009, during which single mothers had higher unemployment rates than married mothers and childless women (Mattingly et al 2011).…”

Informal Competition and Innovation in Southeast Asian Countries: Examining the Moderating Influence of Gender

“…Given the nature of our dataset, a multilevel mixed-effects logit model (MELM) was utilized to account for the hierarchical/multilevel issue. This method has the advantage of considering the hierarchical nature of observations and controlling for possible variations at each level (Hetling, Kwon, & Saunders, 2015;StataCorp, 2017a). The MELM was estimated by the "melogit" command in Stata.…”