This study set out to understand the poverty risks of single parents in the context of the rise of the dual-earner household. Data from the LIS database were used to analyze individuals and households from 18 OECD countries in the period 1984 to 2010. There were to main findings. The first is...

This study examines how earnings penalties to motherhood combine with the cost of partner absence to affect single mothers' economic well-being. Using 25-years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1990 to 2015 and fixed-effect models with individual-specific...

I examine how single motherhood affects income at different quantiles of the distribution in twelve rich countries. Using harmonised data from the Luxembourg Income Study, I show how the distribution of income for single-mother headed households differs to that of coupleheaded households with...

Previous research has shown single mothers to be less well-off and at higher risk of poverty than mothers in couples. In this article, I extend current research by examining how single motherhood affects income at different quantiles of the distribution in twelve rich nations. Using harmonised...

Objective: To assess whether an indicator of structural racism - the legacy of slavery - impacts racial inequality in poverty among individuals within the same family structure. Background: Family structure is a dominant explanation for racial inequality in poverty. This overemphasis on an...

The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence on the effect of child health on marital stability and family structure within an economic framework. We use the 1988 National Health Interview Survey's Child Health Supplement, with a sample of about 9,000 families to test whether having an...

This paper is the first to examine changes in poverty over time using a comprehensive set of linked survey and administrative data, implementing recommendations of the Interagency Technical Working Group on Evaluating Alternative Measures of Poverty. Using the Comprehensive Income Dataset (CID),...

We investigate the role of employment in explaining changes in the mental health of single mothers compared to partnered mothers and single childless women during the period of welfare reform in the UK. We employ a time allocation framework to explore if reductions in benefit income led to a...

The Income Maintenance Experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a Basic Income. Proponents viewed a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives and reduced poverty. However, existing labor supply estimates...

The recent economic recession triggered by the global pandemic has renewed scholarly interest in the role of social welfare systems in supporting economically vulnerable families when they experience employment instability. This article unpacks the patterns of the cash and in-kind components of...

Worldwide, single mothers are profoundly time and income constrained, making them heavily reliant on government transfers. We examine how welfare reforms that introduced mutual obligations affected the economic position of single mothers and the development of their children over the past two...

As Korea is expected to see an increase in the share of single-parent families, this study analyzes the impact of a family transition from a two-parent to single-parent home on child development. The level of development is measured based on health, self-regulated learning, emotional disorders,...

Single mothers often experience precarious financial conditions. However, it is not fully understood to what extent separation is the cause of these conditions versus being their consequence. Estimating an endogenous switching regression model based on a sample of 626 separated and 5,525...

Recent analysis has suggested that poverty rates, and their variation across rich countries, is driven much less by the prevalence of certain risks than by the poverty penaltyattached to the risks. Focusing on single motherhood as a poverty risk, it is claimed the penalty attached to it is...

The Income Maintenance Experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a Basic Income. Proponents viewed a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives and reduced poverty. However, existing labor supply estimates...

We characterize the optimal reform of U.S. income support for low-income single parents. We develop a heterogeneous agents model with idiosyncratic risk and incomplete asset markets where single parents evolve through three life stages defined by their children's care needs. Using the U.S....

Declines in the welfare caseload in the late 1990s brought significant change to the lives of many low-educated, single mothers. Many single mothers left welfare and entered the labor market and others re-arranged their lives in order to avoid going on public assistance. These changes may have...

We study whether welfare reform adversely affected the health insurance coverage of low-educated single mothers and their children. Specifically, we investigate whether changes in the welfare caseload during the 1990s were associated with changes in Medicaid participation, private insurance...

A large literature evaluating the welfare effects of taxation has examined the role of the labor supply elasticity, and has shown that the estimated welfare effects are highly sensitive to its size. A common feature of this literature is its exclusive focus on hours worked and the associated...

be responsible for poor health and low levels of schooling among the children of young mothers. This paper uses special disability and grade repetition questions from the school enrollment supplement to the 1992 Current Population Survey to estimate the effect of maternal age and single...

Family is a factory producing human personalities and it is a unit with the married couple and their children. In modern society, the family faces a large number of changes. In the current special setup, one of the major problems that a family encounters is disorganization. Through it, the...

I estimate the fraction of widows that will be in poverty by projecting the economic status, as measured in 1979, of a cohort of the elderly. The projections are based on an economic model of consumption behavior. I define and estimate a consumption-based measure of poverty status that, I...

The austerity motivated reforms of the UK benefit system have had a devastating and disproportionate impact on vulnerable groups. Lone mothers are challenging these regulations as discriminatory. Their claims raise an under-theorized question: how should courts adjudicate claims for status...

We use data from the national longitudinal Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate the effect of poor child health on father presence. We look at whether parents live in the same household 12-18 months after the child's birth and also at how their relationships changed along a...

While there has been considerable research on the disincentive effects of cash welfare under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, there is little evidence on the benefits of the program for single mothers and their children. One potential benefit of this program is that it...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families—the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...

■ As Korea is expected to see an increase in the share of single-parent families, this study analyzes the impact of a family transition from a two-parent to single-parent home on child development. - The level of development is measured based on health, self-regulated learning, emotional...

The Income Maintenance Experiments have received renewed attention due to growing international interest in a Basic Income. Proponents viewed a Negative Income Tax as a replacement for traditional welfare with stronger work incentives and reduced poverty. However, existing labor supply estimates...

During 1984-96, welfare and tax policy changed dramatically. The Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded, welfare benefits were cut, welfare time limits were added and cases were terminated, Medicaid for the working poor was expanded, training programs were redirected, and subsidized or free child...

Services for single parents constitute a category of child and family services. These services are carried out by public and non-governmental bodies for people who are single parents by the unfortunate events or by their own choice. Individuals come to single parenthood mainly through divorce,...

This paper examines the impact of actual subsidy receipt of single mothers on their joint employment and child care mode decisions in the post-welfare reform environment, which places a high priority on parental choice with the quality and type of care chosen. Results indicate that single...

High risk of poverty and low employment rates are widespread among low-skilled groups, especially in the case of some household compositions (e.g. single mothers). "Making-work-pay" policies have been advocated for and implemented to address these issues. They alleviate the above-mentioned...

This paper provides an analysis of child care subsidies under welfare reform. Previous studies of child care subsidies use data from the pre-welfare-reform period, and their results may not apply to the very different post-reform environment. We use data from the 1999 National Survey of...

We present the results from a natural experiment in which single mothers on welfare were stimulated to find a job. Two policy instruments were introduced: an earnings disregard and job creation. The experiment was performed at the level of municipalities in The Netherlands, a country with...

Lone mothers are overrepresented among poor people in many European countries. In 1998, in Norway, a welfare reform increased the amount of benefits and introduced working requirements. Using a quasi-experimental model, Mogstad and Pronzato (2012) find a positive effect of the reform on lone...

This paper contributes to the debate about the optimal design of tax - transfer systems. Based on the theory of optimal taxation, combined with microsimulation and microeconometric techniques we derive the welfare function which makes the current German tax and transfer system for single women...

This paper provides a comprehensive demographic analysis of the family structure experiences of children in the U.S. Childbearing and transitions among co-residential union states defined by single, cohabiting, and married are analyzed jointly. A novel contribution is to distinguish men by their...

This paper examines the effect of public assistance, labor market and marriage market conditions on the prevalence of single mother families across countries and over time. A multinomial logit derived from a random utility approach is estimated using individual-level data for 14 countries. I...

In Canada, a policy aiming at helping single parents on social assistance become self-reliant was implemented on an experimental basis. The Self-Sufficiency Entry Effects Demonstration randomly selected a sample of 4,134 single parents who had applied for welfare between January 1994 and March...

Several theoretical contributions, starting with McElroy and Horney (1981) and Manser and Brown (1980), have suggested to model household behavior as a Nash-bargaining game. Since then, very few attempts have been made to operationalize cooperative models of household labor supply for policy...

We examine the effect of single motherhood on children's secondary school track choice using a sample of 14 years old children drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. In line with previous studies for the U.S., the U.K. and Sweden, we find a negative correlation between disrupted family...