Immigrant and Native Responses to Welfare Reform

Robert Kaestner and Neeraj Kaushal

No 8541, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the effect of federal welfare reform on the employment, hours of work and marriage rates of three groups of low-educated women: foreign-born citizens, foreign-born non-citizens and native-born citizens. Among non-citizens, we investigate whether the behavioral response to welfare reform differed by recency of immigration. Finally, because some states created programs to insure that all legal immigrants remained eligible for benefits under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program and others did not, we compare the response of foreign-born non-citizens between these states to investigate whether the immigrant provisions of federal welfare reform legislation had a 'chilling' effect. The results suggest that welfare reform induced native-born citizens and foreign- born non-citizens to increase their employment and attachment to the labor market. TANF appears to have had a larger effect on the least educated native-born women and among foreign-born non-citizens, a larger effect on more recent arrivals. The 'chilling' hypothesis that has received so much attention in the popular press is not supported by our results. Finally, our estimates indicate that TANF had no effect on native- and foreign-born citizens' marriage decisions. TANF was associated with a decrease in the marriage rates of foreign-born non-citizens.

JEL-codes: J2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published as Kaestner, Robert and Neeraj Kaushal. "Immigrant And Native Responses To Welfare Reform," Journal of Population Economics, 2005, v18(1,Mar), 69-92.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8541.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrant and native responses to welfare reform (2005)
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:8541

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w8541

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 ().