TY - JOUR AU - Joyce,Ted AU - Kaestner,Robert AU - Korenman,Sanders AU - Henshaw,Stanley TI - Family Cap Provisions and Changes in Births and Abortions JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 10214 PY - 2004 Y2 - January 2004 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10214 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10214.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Theodore J. Joyce Baruch College & Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Ave, 5th Fl New York, NY 10016-4309 Tel: 212/817-7960 Fax: 212/817-1597 E-Mail: theodore.joyce@baruch.cuny.edu Robert Kaestner Institute of Government and Public Affairs University of Illinois 815 West Van Buren Street, Suite 525 Chicago, IL 60607 Tel: 312/996-8227 E-Mail: kaestner.robert@gmail.com Sanders Korenman School of Public Affairs Baruch College City University of New York One Bernard Baruch Way Box D-901 New York, NY 10010 Tel: 646/660-6782 Fax: 646/660-6770 E-Mail: sanders.korenman@baruch.cuny.edu Stanley Henshaw The Alan Guttmacher Institute 120 Wall Street New York, NY 10005 Tel: 212/248-1111 Fax: 212/248-1951 E-Mail: shenshaw@agi-usa.org AB - As part of welfare reform efforts in the 1990s, twenty-three states implemented family caps, provisions that deny or reduce cash assistance to welfare recipients who have additional births. We use birth and abortion records from 24 states to estimate effects of family caps on birth and abortion rates. We use age, marital status and completed schooling to identify women at high risk for use of public assistance, and parity (number of previous live births) to identify those most directly affected by the family cap. In family cap states, birth rates fell more and abortion rates rose more among high-risk women with at least one previous live birth compared to similar childless women, consistent with an effect of the family cap. However, this parity-specific pattern of births and abortions also occurred in states that implemented welfare reform with no family cap. Thus, the effects of welfare reform may have differed between mothers and childless women, but there is little evidence of an independent effect of the family cap. ER -