Lone Female Headship and Welfare Policy in Canada

Martin Dooley (), Stephane Gascon (), Pierre Lefebvre and Philip Merrigan

No 76, Cahiers de recherche CREFE / CREFE Working Papers from CREFE, Université du Québec à Montréal

Abstract: The principal qualifying condition for welfare in Canada, unlike the US, is financial need - there are no demographic criteria. We use a time-series of annual, national cross-sections for the period 1981 through 1993 to estimate a model of lone-female headship. Our findings do not support the hypothesis that welfare benefit levels for one-parent and two-parent families are important determinants of the likelihood that a Canadian woman is a lone mother. In all models with provincial fixed effects, the coefficients for welfare benefits are small, statistically insignificant and often of the unexpected sign. We do find that the probability that a woman is a lone mother is generally associated in the expected fashion with her earnings capacity and the earnings capacity of her potential male partner, and with her age and schooling.

La principale condition d'éligibilité à l'assistance sociale au Canada s'exprime en termes de besoins financiers plutôt que sur la base d'un critère démographique comme aux États-Unis. Nous utilisons une série de coupes transversales répétées sur les années 1981 à 1993 pour estimer un modèle expliquant le statut de famille monoparentale à chef féminin. Nos résultats ne supportent pas l'hypothèse que les niveaux d'assistance sociale pour les familles biparentales et monoparentales sont des déterminants importants de la probabilité qu'une Canadienne soit chef de famille monoparentale. Dans tous les modèles estimés avec des effects fixes provinciaux, les coefficients des variables de niveaux d'assistance sociale sont faibles, statistiquement non significatifs et souvent du mauvais signe. Nous trouvons cependant que la probabilité qu'une femme soit chef de famille monoparentale dépend, comme on peut s'y attendre, de son potentiel à gagner un revenu et de celui de son partenaire potentiel, de son âge et de son niveau d'éducation.

Keywords: Lone-female headship; welfare; fixed effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I3 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 1999-04
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah76.ps Main text (application/postscript)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah76.ps [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah76.ps)
http://www.unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah76.pdf Main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden (http://www.unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah76.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://unites.uqam.ca/eco/CREFE/cahiers/cah76.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Lone Female Headship and Welfare Policy in Canada (1998)
Working Paper: Lone Female Headship and Welfare Policy in Canada
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:cre:crefwp:76

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche CREFE / CREFE Working Papers from CREFE, Université du Québec à Montréal P.O. Box 8888, Downtown Station, Montreal (Canada) Quebec, H3C 3P8. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stéphane Pallage ().