TY - JOUR AU - Kaestner,Robert AU - Kaushal,Neeraj TI - Immigrant and Native Responses to Welfare Reform JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 8541 PY - 2001 Y2 - October 2001 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8541 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8541.pdf N1 - Author contact info: 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 Neeraj Kaushal Columbia University School of Social Work 1255 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027 Tel: 212/851-2235 Fax: 212/851-2204 E-Mail: nk464@columbia.edu M2 - featured in NBER digest on 2002-03-01 AB - In this paper, we investigate the effect of federal welfare reform on the employment, hours of work and marriage rates of three groups of low-educated women: foreign-born citizens, foreign-born non-citizens and native-born citizens. Among non-citizens, we investigate whether the behavioral response to welfare reform differed by recency of immigration. Finally, because some states created programs to insure that all legal immigrants remained eligible for benefits under the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program and others did not, we compare the response of foreign-born non-citizens between these states to investigate whether the immigrant provisions of federal welfare reform legislation had a 'chilling' effect. The results suggest that welfare reform induced native-born citizens and foreign- born non-citizens to increase their employment and attachment to the labor market. TANF appears to have had a larger effect on the least educated native-born women and among foreign-born non-citizens, a larger effect on more recent arrivals. The 'chilling' hypothesis that has received so much attention in the popular press is not supported by our results. Finally, our estimates indicate that TANF had no effect on native- and foreign-born citizens' marriage decisions. TANF was associated with a decrease in the marriage rates of foreign-born non-citizens. ER -