Poverty & Welfare Reform: A Study of Children & Mothers

说明(由申请人提供)：贫困，特别是儿童中的深度贫困，可能会产生直接和持久的负面后果。贫困家庭的孩子在健康和教育方面更差，更有可能成为青少年父母。美国的儿童贫困率从20世纪90年代初的创纪录高位下降到2000年的创纪录低点，许多政治领导人指出，这一下降证明1996年的联邦福利改革立法取得了成功。虽然贫困率有所下降，但最近的“研究表明，由于福利改革，处于收入分配最底层的一群母亲和孩子的境况变差了”(Blank和Haskins 2001)。贫困率下降，加上收入分配最底层人群的经济福祉恶化，表明并非所有群体都从福利改革和强劲的经济中受益，要理解贫困，需要的不仅仅是贫困率。该项目利用收入和计划参与调查(SIPP)、收入动态小组研究(PSID)和城市研究所福利规则数据库的纵向数据，将提供过去25年来儿童及其家庭的贫困状况，并评估福利政策与贫困之间的关系。为了提供贫困在过去25年中的变化情况，这项研究将考察四个不同的贫困衡量标准：(1)贫困率，(2)深度贫困率，(3)穷人的平均收入，(4)穷人之间的收入分配。后三项考虑了贫困程度，从而填补了仅由贫困率提供的不完整的贫困图景。为了评估福利政策与贫困之间的关系，多元框架估计了具体福利政策对贫困和深度贫困的影响。这种关系是根据种族和民族对儿童和他们的母亲进行估计的。确定福利改革对贫困的影响需要将州和联邦福利政策的影响与其他影响贫困的因素分开，例如其他社会政策、经济状况和人口结构变化。这在一定程度上是由我们研究人群的独特设计实现的：恒定的单身母亲群体，她们在福利改革前和福利改革后时期具有可比性，而且容易受到福利领取和贫困的影响。此外，计量经济学规范包括许多个人和州级别的变量，以及州、时间和个人级别的固定效应。这项研究的自然延伸是使用更广泛的收入衡量标准--一种实验性的贫困衡量标准--进行类似的分析。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Poverty especially deep poverty among children can have both immediate and lasting negative consequences. Children in poor families are worse off in terms of health and education, and are more likely to become teen parents. The United States has seen child poverty rates fall from record highs in the early 1990s to record lows in 2000, and many political leaders point to this decline as evidence that the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation has been a success. While poverty rates have dropped, recent "research shows that there is a group of mothers and children at the bottom of the income distribution who are worse off as a result of welfare reform" (Blank and Haskins 2001). Falling poverty rates coupled with this deterioration in economic well-being for those at the bottom of the income distribution suggest that not all groups have benefited from welfare reform and the strong economy and that more than the poverty rate is needed to understand poverty. Using longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), and the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, this project will provide a picture of the poverty status of children and their families over the last two and a half decades and evaluate the relationship between welfare policies and poverty. To provide a picture of changes in poverty over the last 25 years, this study will examine four distinct poverty measures: (1) poverty rate, (2) deep poverty rate, (3) average income of the poor, and (4) distribution of income among the poor. The latter three take account of the degree of poverty, thereby filling in the incomplete poverty picture provided by the poverty rate alone. To evaluate the relationship between welfare policies and poverty, the multivariate framework estimates the effect of specific welfare policies on poverty and deep poverty. This relationship is estimated for both children and their mothers, by race and ethnicity. Identifying the effect of welfare reform on poverty requires disentangling the effect of state and federal welfare policies from other factors that affect poverty, such as other social policies, economic conditions, and demographic shifts in the population. This is accomplished in part by the unique design of our study population: a constant population of ever single mothers who are both comparable in the pre- and post-welfare reform periods and vulnerable to welfare receipt and poverty. In addition, the econometrics specification includes many individual- and state-level variables, as well as state, time, and individual-level fixed effects. A natural extension of this study is to carry out similar analyses using a broader measure of income--an experimental poverty measure.