Census Grants Program Generates
New Research
Researchers use Census data to explore issues
of poverty and welfare reform
Fall 2005, Volume 27, Number 1
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From
left: Ariel Kalil, Greg J. Duncan, and Francesca Mazzolari |
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Since 1998, a grants program funded by the U.S. Census Bureau and coordinated by the Joint Center for Poverty Research (JCPR) has produced wide-ranging research on poverty and welfare reform. Their common thread is the use of data from the Census’ two major longitudinal surveys, the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) and the Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD). IPR Faculty Fellow Greg J. Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy, directs the program.
At the 2003-04 JCPR/Census Bureau Research Development Grants Conference, four papers were presented:
In this paper, Jeffrey Capizzano of Teaching Strategies, Inc. and Regan Main and Sandi Nelson of the Urban Institute use 1999 SIPP data to investigate how often teenagers provide child care for younger siblings and the factors that increase the likelihood of this arrangement. Twenty percent of families with at least one teenager and one child under the age of 12 have their teens babysit for 10 hours per week on average. Teens in single-parent households, especially where the parent has a full-time, odd-hour job, babysit longer hours. Having a female teenager does not mean that families are more likely to use this arrangement. Two-parent families use this option more if the child’s primary caretaker is employed odd-hours when fewer formal options exist. Finally, welfare families appear less likely to use adolescent care and for fewer hours compared to single-parent families not on welfare.
The Work Disincentive Effects of the Disability Insurance Program in the 1990s
Susan Chen of Duke University and H. Wilbert van der Klaauw of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, considered whether Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) actually accounted for a large decline in the number of men aged 35-64 working in the 1990s because of generous benefits. By combining SIPP with Social Security data, they found that during the 1990s the work disincentive effects of the DI program were modest: The labor force participation of DI applicants would have been at most 23 percentage points higher had none received benefits compared with the case where all received benefits. They find even smaller labor supply responses for a subgroup of “marginal” DI applicants who qualify on the basis of both vocational factors and medical factors (rather than medical factors alone). For these individuals, they found that increasing the age cutoffs for DI award eligibility based on vocational factors would increase the labor supply by 20 hours each month and labor force participation by 12 percentage points.
Immigrants’ Welfare Participation after Welfare Reform
In addition to overhauling welfare, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 also limited benefits for immigrants. Francesca Mazzolari of Rutgers and Nora Gordon of the University of California, San Diego, used SIPP data to detect differential changes in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, and Medicaid coverage among immigrants versus natives from 1997 to 2000. They found a disproportionate drop for food stamps, Medicaid, and TANF. No drop was found when comparing naturalized citizens to natives. Where previous studies found little or no decline, the authors found “chilling effects” for noncitizens with at least a high school degree, who live in families where some members are citizens and others are not. This suggests that noncitizen mothers of U.S. children might not be applying for aid due to fear of deportation.
Parental Job Loss and Children’s Academic Progress in Two-Parent Families
Ariel Kalil and Kathleen M. Ziol-Guest of the Harris School at the University of Chicago use 1996 SIPP data on 4,500 school-age children to examine the effects of maternal and paternal job loss and unemployment on adolescents’ risk of grade repetition and suspension/expulsion. They find no linkages between mothers’ employment and children’s academic progress. In contrast, they find significant adverse effects of fathers’ job losses on both of these outcomes. In the case of grade repetition, this effect was only true for involuntary losses and was mediated by family income instability. For school suspension/expulsion, multiple job losses that were either voluntary or involuntary had adverse effects. The adverse associations between fathers’ job losses and grade repetition are especially true for lower-income and younger children, whereas the associations between fathers’ job losses and suspension/expulsion are apparent for higher-income children in particular.
Click here for complete copies of the papers.
