Family Cap Provisions and Changes in Births and Abortions

Ted Joyce, Robert Kaestner, Sanders Korenman and Stanley Henshaw

No 10214, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: As part of welfare reform efforts in the 1990s, twenty-three states implemented family caps, provisions that deny or reduce cash assistance to welfare recipients who have additional births. We use birth and abortion records from 24 states to estimate effects of family caps on birth and abortion rates. We use age, marital status and completed schooling to identify women at high risk for use of public assistance, and parity (number of previous live births) to identify those most directly affected by the family cap. In family cap states, birth rates fell more and abortion rates rose more among high-risk women with at least one previous live birth compared to similar childless women, consistent with an effect of the family cap. However, this parity-specific pattern of births and abortions also occurred in states that implemented welfare reform with no family cap. Thus, the effects of welfare reform may have differed between mothers and childless women, but there is little evidence of an independent effect of the family cap.

JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tid
Note: EH PE CH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published as Joyce, T., Kaestner, R., Korenman, S., and S. Henshaw. “ Family Cap Provisions and Changes in Births and Abortions.” Population Research and Policy Review 23 (2004): 475-511.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10214.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:10214

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10214

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().