The Material Well-Being of Single Mother Households in the 1980s and 1990s: What Can We Learn From Food Spending?

Thomas DeLeire (thomas.deleire@georgetown.edu) and Helen Levy

No 501, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: A combination of welfare reform, expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other policy changes led to increases in the labor supply of single mothers in the 1990s and a decline in their participation in cash welfare programs. Whether the material well-being of single mothers and their families has improved is less clear. Meyer and Sullivan (2004) report that single mothers’ food expenditure increased during the 1990s and conclude that their well-being either improved or remained the same, relative to single childless women or married women with children. Our reading of the data suggests that a more cautious interpretation is in order. In particular, we note that increases in food spending do not necessarily reflect increases in well-being. Total food spending may change even though the actual food consumed did not if there is a shift from home-prepared food to commercially-prepared or restaurant food. We examine trends in spending on food at home and food away from home using data from the Consumer Expenditure Diary Survey and find that they are consistent with such a shift. We find that the entire increase in food expenditure can be explained by a shift from food at home to food away from home.

Keywords: welfare reform; earned income tax credit; food; food expenditures; food consumption; single mothers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-09
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/about/publication ... ers/pdf/wp_05_01.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to harrisschool.uchicago.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

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:har:wpaper:0501

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eleanor Cartelli (cartelli@uchicago.edu this e-mail address is bad, please contact repec@repec.org).