Newly Poor Women and the Social Safety Net, 1990–2010

Rebecca Blank, David Card and Hanns Kuttner

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2024, vol. 711, issue 1, 121-143

Abstract: Welfare reforms in the 1990s, particularly the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, were motivated by concerns over the long-term poor. We compare the experiences of newly poor women in 1990–1992, 2001–2003, and 2008–2010 and find that the size and sources of the income shocks generating new spells of poverty remained relatively stable. In dual-head families, the newly poor were most often pushed into poverty by a drop in spousal earnings; in single-mother families, the main cause was a drop in personal earnings. For single mothers in the latter two periods, we find that income from cash transfers after becoming poor was less than in the 1990–1992 benchmark. As these transfers include welfare payments, the timing points to the impacts of the 1996 welfare reforms.

Keywords: poverty; poverty measurement; safety net; welfare reform; Survey of Income and Program Participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:711:y:2024:i:1:p:121-143

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241291684

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