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Title: Children's Welfare Exposure and Subsequent Development
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Levine, Phillip B.
Zimmerman, David J.
Children's Welfare Exposure and Subsequent Development
NBER Working Paper No. 7522, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2000.
Also: http://www.nber.org/papers/w7522
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Keyword(s): Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Children, Poverty; Hispanics; Household Income; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Mothers, Income; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Siblings; Variables, Instrumental; Welfare

We examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother's receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes. Using data from the matched mother-child file from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that children's welfare exposure is substantial. By age 10 over one-third of all children will have lived in a welfare household; black, non-Hispanic children face a much higher rate of exposure. Simple correlations suggest a strong negative relationship between maternal welfare receipt and children's outcomes. In this paper we implement three alternative strategies (instrumental variables, sibling difference, and child fixed effects models) designed to identify whether this correlation can be attributed to the mother's welfare receipt directly or to other characteristics of mothers who receive welfare, regardless of whether or not those characteristics are observable to the researcher. Based on the results of all three estimation strategies, we find little evidence of any causal link between maternal welfare receipt and children's developmental outcomes.
Bibliography Citation
Levine, Phillip B. and David J. Zimmerman. "Children's Welfare Exposure and Subsequent Development." NBER Working Paper No. 7522, National Bureau of Economic Research, February 2000.