Making Single Mothers Work: Recent Tax and Welfare Policy and its Effects / Bruce D. Meyer, Dan T. Rosenbaum.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Meyer, Bruce D.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Rosenbaum, Dan T.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w7491.

NBER working paper series no. w7491

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Making Single Mothers Work

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2000.

Summary:

We describe the enormous changes in social and tax policy in recent years that have encouraged work by single mothers. We document the changes in federal and state income taxes, AFDC and Food Stamp benefits, Medicaid, training and child care programs. We describe the quantitative importance of these changes and their timing. We also describe how these changes differed across states and show how they affected families with different numbers and ages of children and with different family incomes. We then examine whether the changes in employment rates over time for different demographic groups and states are consistent with a causal effect of these policies on employment. We use multiple comparison groups and two datasets over a long time period. The results support the more structural findings in Meyer and Rosenbaum (1999a) of substantial EITC effects on employment as well as the findings in Eissa and Liebman (1996) and Ellwood (1999).

Notes:

Print version record

January 2000.