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The NLS Annotated Bibliography - User Submission Form
ACS, GREGORY P. Impact of AFDC on Young Women's Childbearing Decisions Report, Urban Institute, Washington, D.C., May 1, 1994. Also: http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=405097 Cohort(s): NLSY79 ID Number: 6252 Publisher: Urban Institute Press This study examines the relationship between Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and fertility by focusing on births to women through age 23 using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It focuses on the impact of AFDC on births directly associated with AFDC, on out-of-wedlock births, and on all births. In addition, it examines the importance of AFDC on subsequent births to women who already have a child. The author uses these data to examine whether AFDC promotes out-of-wedlock birth or encourages welfare mothers to have more children either to increase their incomes or to remain on the welfare rolls. ACS, GREGORY P. Can We Promote Child Well-Being by Promoting Marriage? Presented: Philadelphia, PA, Population Association of America Annual Meetings, March 30, 2005. Also: http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=51422 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 ID Number: 5362 Publisher: Population Association of America Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Mother-Child files to examine how the relationships between children's well-being and their living arrangements are affected to by the quality of their parents’ marriages and turbulence in their living arrangements. Using the future marital status of children's parents to measure the quality of parents' marriages, I find that children living with parents in a "poor"” marriage have more behavioral problems than children living with parents in "good" marriages. Parental marriage quality does not affect children’s math and reading scores. Interestingly, even children living with parents in a “poor” marriage have fewer behavioral problems and higher math and reading scores than children living with single mothers. Evidence on the impact of recent changes in living arrangements on child well-being is mixed. ACS, GREGORY P. Can We Promote Child Well-Being by Promoting Marriage? Journal of Marriage and Family, 69, 5 (Dec 2007): 1326-1344 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 ID Number: 5710 Publisher: National Council on Family Relations This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort Mother-Child files to explore the idea that child well-being can be improved by encouraging and enhancing parental marriage. I consider how children's living arrangements, the stability of parental marriages, and changes in living arrangements are related to children's behavior and cognitive test scores. Although there is some evidence that children living with their married parents, even parents in unstable marriages, have better outcomes than children living in certain nonmarital arrangements, the findings vary across domains and specifications, and the effect sizes are generally small. Thus, any benefits of policies aimed improving child well-being by encouraging and enhancing parental marriage are likely to be modest at best. ACS, GREGORY P. Impact of AFDC on Young Women's Childbearing Decisions Working Paper. Washington DC: The Urban Institute, May 1993. Also: Presented: Cincinnati, OH, Population Association of America Meetings, April 1993 Cohort(s): NLSY79 ID Number: 9 Publisher: Urban Institute Press The young woman, dependent on public assistance, having child after child has reemerged as the favorite symbol for politicians decrying the U.S. welfare system. Since the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program provides support to poor families with children, with larger grants going to households with more children, concern over AFDCs pro-natalist effects have a strong theoretical foundation--AFDC lowers the cost of having children. Research in this area has focused on first births to unwed teenagers and has found scant evidence supporting the contention that AFDC promotes out-of-wedlock births. This paper seeks to re-evaluate the relationship between AFDC and childbearing by focusing not just on births to teenagers but also on births to women in their mid-twenties using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Using discrete time hazard models, I examine the impact of AFDC on births directly associated with welfare receipt, on out-of-wedlock births, and on all births. I also examine the importance of AFDC on subsequent births--births to women who already have a child. I find that AFDC generosity has very modest pro-natalist effects at best on first births and virtually no effect on subsequent births. Furthermore, exposure to AFDC does not encourage future childbearing although mothers who received AFDC in the past are more likely to receive AFDC upon having a second child. ACS, GREGORY P. Impact of AFDC on Young Women's Childbearing Decisions Discussion Paper No. 1011-93. Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin - Madison, November 1993 Cohort(s): NLSY79 ID Number: 10 Publisher: Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP), University of Wisconsin - Madison Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Contrary to popular belief, unmarried women do not bear children in order to obtain welfare benefits, and women who are on welfare do not have additional children in order to collect more money. The major welfare program for single mothers -- and the program most people have in mind when they think of welfare -- is Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Every state operates its own AFDC program, which pays a monthly cash benefit to mothers who apply for and qualify for assistance. Research by Gregory Acs of the Urban Institute finds that the size of a state's AFDC benefit has no impact on the decision of an unmarried woman to have a child or on the decision of a mother who already receives AFDC to have another child. Politicians, the press, and the public have latched onto the argument that the welfare system encourages childbearing. The cost of raising a child, however, is substantial, and the amount of money a woman would receive from the AFDC program would hardly defray that cost. According to Acs, restricting benefits for welfare recipients who have additional children may send a significant symbolic message--that long-term dependence on welfare is not an acceptable way to live--but it is unlikely to have any effect on childbearing. Consequently, restricting or sharply reducing AFDC benefits for needy women and children is difficult to justify. ACS, GREGORY P. Impact of Welfare on Young Mothers' Subsequent Childbearing Decisions Journal of Human Resources 31,4 (Fall 1996): 898-915 Cohort(s): NLSY79 ID Number: 2691 Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Politicians, the press, and the public have become increasingly worried about welfare becoming a "lifestyle" in which women have multiple births both to increase their incomes and to prolong their stays on the welfare roles. Such concerns have given rise to policy proposals such as the "family rap" which would deny welfare recipients higher welfare payments if they have another child while on welfare. This paper examines the relationship between welfare and births to women who already have a child. using data on young mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). I find that variations in welfare benefit levels and the incremental benefit have no statistically significant impacts on the subsequent childbearing decisions of young mothers in general, nor on the subsequent childbearing decisions of women who received welfare in particular. Furthermore, mothers who received welfare to support their first children are no more likely to have additional child ren in any given year through the age of 23. Fulltext online. Photocopy available from ABI/INFORM. Copyright Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System 1996 ACS, GREGORY P. Welfare, Work, and Dependence: Analyzing the Potential Effects of Work-Related Welfare Reform Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1990. DAI-A 51/07, p. 2477, January 1991 Cohort(s): NLSY79 ID Number: 12 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This dissertation explores the impact of one welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), on (1) young women's work and training decisions, referred to as investments in human capital, and (2) their wages, known as returns to human capital. As such, it holds implications for the potential success of work-related welfare reforms. Unobservable differences between women, like attitudes, may both reduce work effort and increase welfare use. The presence of such an unobservable fixed effect, as it is called, could induce an overestimate of welfare's negative impact on work. By using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), I can detect such fixed effect and obtain unbiased estimates. In the presence of a fixed effect, the Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDV) technique generates unbiased estimates because it exploits changes in women's behavior over time and ignores the variation between women. However, if the unobserved differences between women are random--not correlated with both work and welfare decisions--then they do not induce a bias, and a Generalized Least Squares (GLS) technique, which exploits both sources of variation, provides more precise estimates. If the true effect is random, then the LSDV and GLS estimators should yield similar results, and GLS should be used. If the two estimates differ, then a fixed effect is probably present and the LSDV technique is preferred. The Hausman Specification test formally makes this comparison. I cannot reject the random effects model--the coefficients are remarkably similar--and hence use the GLS technique. Using several different specifications and using both predicted and actual measures of AFDC use, I find that historical AFDC receipt has small, negative impact on women's work decisions. I also find that women who received AFDC enjoy substantially less wage growth over time than women who avoided the dole. However, this appears to be caused by lower levels of investment r ather than lower rates of return on such investments. AFDC recipients experience slower wage growth because they acquire less experience, education, and training than other women. I conclude that since AFDC recipients can benefit from investments in human capital and the program seems to inhibit investments, work-related welfare reforms could reduce dependence on government aid. But the effects are likely to be quite small. ACS, GREGORY P. KOBALL, HEATHER TANF and the Status of Teen Mothers Under Age 18 Urban Institute, No. A-62 in Series, "New Federalism: Issues and Options for States" (June 2003). Also: http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=310796 Cohort(s): NLSY97 ID Number: 4312 Publisher: Urban Institute Press The authors find that, in the short term, there is no evidence that minor teen mothers were harmed or helped much by residency and activity requirements in TANF or even by welfare reform policies in general. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 cohort, they find few significant differences in minor teen birth rates, living arrangements, and school enrollment between 1997 and 2000. While not significant, the trends are consistent with the goal of welfare reform to reduce teen childbearing. Although their receipt of cash assistance has dropped significantly, about 80 percent of minor teen moms receive some form of public assistance. ACS, GREGORY P. WISSOKER, DOUGLAS A. Impact of Local Labor Markets on the Employment Patterns of Young Inner-City Males Presented: Washington, DC, Population Association of America Meetings, 1991 Cohort(s): NLSY79 ID Number: 13 Publisher: Population Association of America Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Over the past two decades, both people and firms have moved from centralized urban areas to the suburbs. Some argue that the resulting spatial isolation of those left in the inner-city has contributed to rising joblessness and concentrated urban poverty. In this analysis, the authors examine the relative importance of spatial isolation, individual characteristics, and the strength of local labor markets on the post-schooling employment patterns of young men using data from the NLSY. Although inner-city youth unemployment rates are higher than those of other youth, the authors found that this reflects differences in individual and city-wide characteristics rather than location within an urban area. Indeed, while living in an inner-city appears to have little effect on the employment patterns of youth, differences in the local economy measured by SMSA-level unemployment rates significantly affect the amount of time it takes youth to find jobs after leaving school and the stability of their employment. LOPREST, PAMELA J. ACS, GREGORY P. Profile of Disability Among Families on AFDC Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, November 1996. Also: http://www.kff.org/content/archive/1168/afdcrpt.html#intro Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 ID Number: 4160 Publisher: Kaiser Family Foundation Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The authors assess the extent to which women and families currently receiving AFDC have a limited ability to work due to their own disabilities or those of their children. The resulting disability profile of AFDC recipients raises questions about whether the 20 percent exemption allowed for states is high enough to accommodate the number of recipients who are hard to place in jobs. The researchers employed a functional definition of disability to construct their profile. Under this definition, the interaction among impairments (such as blindness), chronic health conditions (such as arthritis), and social expectations about work is reviewed to determine its effect on the ability of an individual to perform expected work-related tasks - or, in the case of children, age-appropriate functions, such as attending school. To create as complete a profile as possible, the researchers drew data from three sources: the 1990 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the 1990 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and 1992 data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Their analysis reveals that between 27.4 and 29.5 percent of families receiving AFDC have either a mother or child with some level of functional limitation. Despite the differences in sample size and wording of survey questions among the three data sources used, this range is relatively narrow. In addition, since the data do not fully capture limitations due to mental or emotional disorders or substance abuse, these findings probably understate the true level of disability among the AFDC population.
National studies such as the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) use a variety of terms, including impairment, condition, limitations, and disability, all of which are defined slightly differently. Using data from the SIPP, the NHIS, and the NLSY, Loprest and Acs (1996) fo
und that almost 16% of the families in their sample had a child with some type of functional limitation.
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