NBER Publications by Marianne Bitler

Working Papers and Chapters

w10549 Welfare Reform and Health
with Jonah Gelbach, Hilary Hoynes: June 2004

We investigate the relationship between welfare reform and health insurance, health care utilization, and self-reported measures of health status for women aged 20-45, using nationally representative data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. We present estimates from both difference-in-difference models (applied to single women and single women with children) and difference-in-difference-in-difference models (using married women and single women without children as comparison groups). We find that welfare reform is associated with reductions in health insurance coverage and specific measures of health care utilization, as well as an increase in the likelihood of needing care but finding it unaffordable. We find no statistically significant effects of reform on health status...

w10121 What Mean Impacts Miss: Distributional Effects of Welfare Reform Experiments
with Jonah Gelbach, Hilary Hoynes: November 2003

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First waiver features key elements of post-1996 welfare programs. Estimated quantile treatment effects exhibit the substantial heterogeneity predicted by labor supply theory. Thus mean impacts miss a great deal. Looking separately at dropouts and other women does not improve the performance of mean impacts. Evaluating Jobs First relative to AFDC using a class of social welfare functions, we find that Jobs First's performance depends on the degree of inequality aversion, the relative valuation of earnings an...

w8784 The Impact of Welfare Reform on Living Arrangements
with Jonah B. Gelbach, Hilary W. Hoynes: February 2002

Labor market outcomes of welfare reform have been the subject of extensive research by economists, but there has been relatively little work on living arrangements, which was an important focus of reformers. Our research fills that gap by using data from the March CPS to examine the impacts of 1990s welfare waivers and the 1996 Federal welfare reform on living arrangements in samples of both children and women. Our findings suggest three main conclusions. First, welfare reform has had large effects on some important measures of living arrangements, including household size, parental co-residence among children, and marital status among women. Second, those effects are neither entirely aligned with the stated goals of reform nor entirely in spite of these goals. For example, in states that...