TY  - JOUR
AU  - Grogger,Jeff
AU  - Bronars,Stephen G.
TI  - The Effect of Welfare Payments on the Marriage and Fertility Behavior of Unwed Mothers: Results from a Twins Experiment
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6047
PY  - 1997
Y2  - May 1997
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6047
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6047.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Jeffrey Grogger
Irving B. Harris Professor of Urban Policy
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
1155 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL   60637
Tel: 773/542-3533
Fax: 773/702-0926
E-Mail: jgrogger@uchicago.edu

Stephen Bronars
9113 Bell Mountian Drive
Austin, TX  78730-2704
E-Mail: sbronars@welchcon.com
AB  - We study one aspect of the link between welfare and unwed motherhood: the relationship between benefit levels and the time-to-first-marriage and time-to-next-birth among women whose first" child was born out of wedlock.  We use twin births to generate effectively random variation in welfare benefits among mothers within a state, which allows us to control for unobservable characteristics of states that typically confound the relationship between welfare payments and behavior.  The twins approach yields evidence that higher base levels of welfare benefits: (1) lead initially unwed white mothers to forestall their eventual marriage; and (2) lead initially unwed black mothers to hasten their next birth.  The magnitudes of these effects are small, however.  Moreover, we find no evidence that the incremental benefit paid upon the birth of an additional child affects fertility.
ER  -