Welfare Reform and Migration

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Has devolution of welfare policy in the1996 welfare reform legislation created new state benefits and rules inequalities that engender inter-and intra-state migration of welfare poor families? Does welfare-driven migration result in increased after-move well being compared with before the move for welfare poor families versus non-migrant families? This study uses merged data from four sources -- the 1996 and 2001 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and a local labor market characteristics file created from decennial census and Current Population Survey data -- in a longitudinal, two-stage specification of welfare benefit "push" and "pull,' impacts on poor families' migration behavior. Based upon a state welfare policy inequality framework, we use factor analysis to develop measures from post-1996 textual policy manuals to operationalize 15 welfare benefit and eligibility rule dimensions and to test hypothesized state program effects on migration. We use discrete-time event history analysis to predict migration events (inter-state and intra-state migration) in the SIPP data. Our multi-level hierarchical modeling strategy is an integrated, and previously untested, micro-macro analysis of three determinant-of-migration hypotheses for welfare poor families. These tests evaluate effects of 1) time varying state welfare policy characteristics; 2) individual and family characteristics, including five life history dimensions-migration, welfare, work, marital status and childbearing, an educational skills upgrade and network ties from the information-rich SIP files; and 3) local labor market-level economic opportunity structure indicators. Following Frey et al. (1996), we separately analyze push and pull migration effects of our hypothesized co-variants through, first, a "destination model" for identifying pull effects, and then, a "departure model" which identifies push effects for potential migrants' origin locations grouped by class of states according to state policy criteria. This two-stage model with state welfare policy, local labor market, and individual and household indicators will provide a strong test, giving new evidence on the "salience of benefit variation to subjects" thesis (Shram and Voss 1999) regarding the welfare policy impact on migration. Finally, we model post-move family income, welfare benefits, and welfare participation requirements as well-being outcomes of welfare poor migrants versus non-migrants using time-ordered additive and interactive OLS regression models with consideration of migration-selection characteristics.