Changes in Family Structure and Welfare Participation Since the 1960s: The Role of Legal ServicesAndrew Goodman-Bacon, Jamein P. Cunningham
NBER Working Paper No. 26238 This paper evaluates the effects of the War on Poverty’s Legal Services Program (LSP) on family structure and welfare participation. LSPs provided subsidized legal assistance to poor communities, focusing on divorce and welfare access. We use a difference-in-differences research design based on the rollout of the program to 251 counties from 1965 to 1975. We find temporary increases in divorce and persistent increases in welfare participation and nonmarital birth rates. Nonmarital births rose because marriage rates fell, not because birth rates rose. Expanded access to legal institutions thus contributed, directly and indirectly, to changes in family structure in the 1960s. A non-technical summary of this paper is available in the December 2019 NBER Digest.
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Supplementary materials for this paper: Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w26238 |

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