Single Mothers Working at Night: Standard Work, Child Care Subsidies, and Implications for Welfare Reform

Erdal Tekin

No 1014, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using a data set from the post welfare reform environment (the 1999 National Survey of America’s Families), this paper investigates the impact of child care subsidies on the standard work (i.e., work performed during the traditional work hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. through Monday and Friday) decision of single mothers and tests whether this impact differs between welfare recipients and nonrecipients. The econometric strategy accounts for sample selection into the labor force and the potential endogeneity of child care subsidy receipt and welfare participation. Results suggest that child care subsidies are associated with a 6 percentage point increase in the probability of single mothers working at standard jobs. When the impact of subsidies is allowed to differ between welfare recipients and non-recipients, results indicate that welfare recipients are 14 percentage points more likely to work at standard jobs than others when they are offered a child care subsidy. Among non-recipients, child care subsidies increase standard work probability by only 1 percentage point. These results underscore the importance of child care subsidies helping low-income parents, especially welfare recipients, find jobs with conventional or standard schedules and lend support to the current practice of states’ giving priority to welfare recipients for child care subsidies. Results are found to be robust to numerous specification checks.

Keywords: single mothers; standard work; child care subsidies; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I38 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2004-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Published - published in: Economic Inquiry, 2007, 45 (2), 233-250

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp1014.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Single Mothers Working at Night: Standard Work, Child Care Subsidies, and Implications for Welfare Reform (2004)
Working Paper: Single Mothers Working at Night: Standard Work, Child Care Subsidies, and Implications for Welfare Reform (2004)
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:iza:izadps:dp1014

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().