Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence from Age-of-Youngest-Child Exemptions

Autor/in	Herbst, Chris M.
Titel	Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence from Age-of-Youngest-Child Exemptions
Quelle	In: Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 36 (2017) 2, S.327-357 (31 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0276-8739
DOI	10.1002/pam.21971
Schlagwörter	Disadvantaged Youth; Welfare Recipients; Low Income Groups; Cognitive Development; Emotional Development; Social Development; Quasiexperimental Design; Compliance (Legal); Longitudinal Studies; Depression (Psychology); Nutrition; Infants; Policy Analysis; Mothers; Employed Parents; Employed Women; Children; Surveys; Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Benachteiligter Jugendlicher; Sozialhilfeempfänger; Sozialhilfeempfängerin; Kognitive Entwicklung; Gefühlsbildung; Soziale Entwicklung; Longitudinal study; Longitudinal method; Longitudinal methods; Längsschnittuntersuchung; Ernährung; Infant; Toddler; Toddlers; Kleinkind; Politikfeldanalyse; Mother; Mutter; 'Female employment; Women''s employment'; Frauenbeschäftigung; Child; Kind; Kinder; Survey; Umfrage; Befragung
Abstract	This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low-income children's cognitive and social-emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules--namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions--as a source of quasi-experimental variation in first-year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work-requirement-induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01