A primary goal of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation is to increase marriage rates among unskilled women with children. Current theories of marriage under-predict the extent of non-marriage, have not been adequately tested, or do not apply well to women with low-socioeconomic status....

In this paper, we focus on how welfare-reliant mothers view work-family trade-offs in the age of welfare reform. We use data from in-depth, qualitative interviews with approximately 80 welfare-reliant mothers living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty in Philadelphia and Cleveland. These...

Among the most important changes brought about by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is the imposition of time limits. In this paper, we analyze a simple model in which a potential welfare recipient chooses how to allocate her time-limited...