For Immediate Release
June 9, 2004
Contact: Marianne Bitler, RAND, 310-393-0411, ext. 6021, bitler@rand.org; or John Fitzgerald, Bowdoin College, 207-725-3593, jfitzger@bowdoin.edu
No Evidence Welfare Reform Led to More Marriages (June 2004)
(Santa Monica, Calif.). Welfare reforms enacted during the 1990s were designed to end needy parents' dependency on government benefits in part by promoting marriage. But researchers find that these reforms did not deter women from becoming single mothers. The new emphasis on work may have actually given women greater financial independence, thereby decreasing their incentives to marry, according to two articles published in the latest issue of the journal Demography.
Welfare reform has led to fewer new divorces and fewer new marriages, report Marianne Bitler of the RAND Corporation, Jonah Gelbach of the University of Maryland, Hilary Hoynes of the University of California-Davis, and Madeline Zavodny of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. "We can say with confidence that welfare reform is not 'pro-marriage', on balance," they write.
The team used vital statistics data for all U.S. marriages and divorces between 1989 and 2000 to examine the impact of various state level welfare reforms and the 1996 introduction of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF).
They find that welfare reform is associated with a decrease in the number of new divorces, but no evidence that welfare reform led to an increase in the number of new marriages. To explain these findings, they hypothesize that "welfare reform may have different effects on single persons than on married persons." Welfare reform may have increased the number of hours married women would have had to work had they divorced, thereby discouraging divorce, according to the researchers. For single women, welfare reform's work requirements may have led to rising earnings and increased their economic independence, making them less likely to marry, they suggest.
In another related study, John Fitzgerald of Bowdoin College and David Ribar of The George Washington University examined the impact of welfare reform initiatives during the 1990s on women becoming or remaining single mothers. They used data for 1990 to 2000 on income and household living arrangements from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, a nationally representative sample of 20,000 to 40,000 households tracked regularly.
Their analysis took into account the wide variety of state welfare reform policies and local economic and social conditions including the local availability of jobs and potential marriage partners. It looked at the total number of single mothers as well as the number of women each year who became single mothers or who left single motherhood for marriage.
The authors conclude that neither the state level welfare changes in the 1990s, known as waivers, nor the 1996 TANF reforms had a strong impact on single motherhood.
"We found little robust evidence that welfare reform in the 1990s was effective in deterring women from becoming or remaining single parents," they write.
Research for both articles was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Bitler and her colleagues also acknowledge support from the National Institute on Aging. Fitzgerald and Ribar acknowledge the Joint Center for Poverty Research and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Demography is the peer-reviewed journal published by the Population Association of America.
The full articles, titled "The Impact of Welfare Reform on Marriage and Divorce" and "Welfare Reform and Female Headship", are available on www.prb.org/cpipr. Click on articles from journal Demography. Or call the Center for Public Information on Population Research, 202-939-5414. The Center, a project of the Population Reference Bureau, is funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.