Work and Welfare as Determinants of Female Poverty and Household Headship

Sheldon Danziger, George Jakubson, Saul Schwartz and Eugene Smolensky

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1982, vol. 97, issue 3, 519-534

Abstract: This paper formulates and estimates a model of the determinants of female household headship. Headship responds to variations in the levels of well-being a woman can expect if she marries or if she heads her own household. We measure the opportunity cost of female headship and the effects of welfare benefits and women's work in the market on female headship and poverty. We find that if welfare benefits were reduced, there would be small reductions in the proportion of women heading households for whites and nonwhites, but a substantial increase in poverty for nonwhites. We also find that wives' work in the market reduces poverty and female headship for nonwhites, and reduces poverty, but increases headship for whites.

Date: 1982
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1885875 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:97:y:1982:i:3:p:519-534.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().