Making Single Mothers Work: Recent Tax and Welfare Policy and its Effects

Bruce Meyer and Dan Rosenbaum

No 7491, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We describe the enormous changes in social and tax policy in recent years that have encouraged work by single mothers. We document the changes in federal and state income taxes, AFDC and Food Stamp benefits, Medicaid, training and child care programs. We describe the quantitative importance of these changes and their timing. We also describe how these changes differed across states and show how they affected families with different numbers and ages of children and with different family incomes. We then examine whether the changes in employment rates over time for different demographic groups and states are consistent with a causal effect of these policies on employment. We use multiple comparison groups and two datasets over a long time period. The results support the more structural findings in Meyer and Rosenbaum (1999a) of substantial EITC effects on employment as well as the findings in Eissa and Liebman (1996) and Ellwood (1999).

JEL-codes: H24 I38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-01
Note: CH LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (136)

Published as Meyer, Bruce D. and Dan T. Rosenbaum. "Welfare, The Earned Income Tax Credit, And The Labor Supply Of Single Mothers," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001, v116(3,Aug), 1063-1114.
Published as Bruce D. Meyer & Dan T. Rosenbaum, 2000. "Making Single Mothers Work: Recent Tax and Welfare Policy and its Effects," National Tax Journal, vol 53(4, Part 2), pages 1027-1062.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7491.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Making Single Mothers Work: Recent Tax and Welfare Policy and Its Effects (2000)
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:7491

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7491

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 ().