Welfare and Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing: Evidence from the 1980s

Abstract

This study uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, supplemented with state data on welfare policy, to provide new evidence on the link between welfare and teenage out-of-wedlock childbearing in the 1979-1984 period.Logit cross-section and discrete-time hazard models are estimated separately for Hispanics, blacks and whites.The key finding is that, in contrast to the results shown in other work, state welfare policy appears to influence the behavior of blacks and whites.For whites, the welfare guarantee bears a significant, positive relationship to the likelihood of premarital childbearing.For blacks, an index of stringency of a state's eligibility rules for AFDC and a dummy variable for the presence of an AFDC-UP program are significant and negative.Hispanic behavior is not associated with any indicator of state welfare policy.It seems likely that black and white teens are not responding to any one particular attribute of welfare, but instead to a general perception of the benefits and restrictiveness of the program in their area.Welfare and Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing:Evidence from the 1980s * = significant at lo%, ** = significant at 5%