Research on the Effects of the U.S. Welfare System on the Low Income Population

关于福利对生育率、婚姻、同居和家庭的影响的大量实证文献 结构总体上是在过去十年中发展起来的。这部文学的中心趋势是 表明福利福利在许多人假设的方向上有一些影响(例如，更高的福利 带来更低的结婚率和更高的非婚生育率)，但有相当大的 围绕着影响的大小的不确定性，甚至可能是它的存在，因为 不同研究中估计的离散度。这种在研究结果上缺乏共识的做法已经减弱 研究对政策制定者的影响，他们往往认为学术研究没有定论， 或者，能够支持任何结论。该项目将通过开展一项 一系列复制、稳健性和调整性研究，试图缩小过去 研究努力，并试图就影响的存在和大小达成共识。该项目将 被分为解释不同研究的主要阶段和第二阶段 使用统计规格测试和新规格测试来选择哪些是“最佳”型号。在主要领域 在第一阶段，几项主要研究的估计将首先使用相同的数据集进行复制， 模型和那些论文中使用的估计技术；那么估计的稳健性将是 通过在其他论文中使用的数据集上估计每篇论文中使用的模型来确定，使用 尽可能使用相同的样本、变量定义和计量经济学方法；然后 研究之间的差异将追溯到这些因素中的每个因素的差异-潜在的 相同变量的数据集；变量定义中；次抽样总体中；模型规范中 计量经济学方法。第二阶段将由规格测试组成，可供选择 可供选择的模型规范，以及对涉及 家庭背景的重要性，男女工资的影响，以及替代统计 规格。

A substantial empirical literature on the effect of welfare benefits on fertility, marriage, cohabitation, and family structure in general has grown up over the last decade. The central tendency of this literature tends to suggest that welfare benefits have some effect in the direction many have hypothesized (e.g., higher welfare benefits leading to lesser marriage rates and greater nonmarital fertility rates) but there is considerable uncertainty surrounding the magnitude of the effect, and possibly even its existence, because of the large dispersion in estimates across different studies. This lack of consensus in research findings has weakened the impact of the research on policy-makers, who often regard the academic research as inconclusive or, alternatively, as capable of supporting any conclusion. This project will address this problem by conducting a series of replication, robustness, and reconciliation studies in an attempt to narrow the differences across past research efforts and in an attempt to build a consensus for the existence and size of effects. The project will be divided into a primary phase in which differences across studies are explained and a secondary phase in which "best" models are chosen using statistical specification tests and new specifications tested. In the major and primary phase, the estimates from several major studies will first be replicated using the same data sets, models, and estimating techniques used in those papers; then the robustness of the estimates will be ascertained by estimating the models used in each paper on the data sets used in the other papers, using to the greatest extent possible the same samples, variable definitions, and econometric methods; then the differences between studies will be traced to differences in each of these factors-differences in the underlying data sets for the same variables; in variable definition; in subsampled populations; and in model specification and econometric method. The secondary phase will consist of specification tests to choose among the alternative model specifications as well as a more detailed examination of several hypotheses involving the imporance of family background, the influence of male and female wages, and alternative statistical specifications.