TY  - JOUR
AU  - Meyer,Bruce D.
AU  - Rosenbaum,Dan T.
TI  - Making Single Mothers Work: Recent Tax and Welfare Policy and its Effects
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 7491
PY  - 2000
Y2  - January 2000
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7491
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w7491.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Bruce D. Meyer
Harris School of Public Policy
University of Chicago
1155 E. 60th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Tel: 773/702-2712
Fax: 773/702-0926
E-Mail: bdmeyer@uchicago.edu

Dan T. Rosenbaum
E-Mail: drosenbaum@omb.eop.gov
AB  - We describe the enormous changes in social and tax policy in recent years that have encouraged work by single mothers.  We document the changes in federal and state income taxes, AFDC and Food Stamp benefits, Medicaid, training and child care programs. We describe the quantitative importance of these changes and their timing.  We also describe how these changes differed across states and show how they affected families with different numbers and ages of children and with different family incomes.  We then examine whether the changes in employment rates over time for different demographic groups and states are consistent with a causal effect of these policies on employment.  We use multiple comparison groups and two datasets over a long time period.  The results support the more structural findings in Meyer and Rosenbaum (1999a) of substantial EITC effects on employment as well as the findings in Eissa and Liebman (1996) and Ellwood (1999).
ER  -