TY - JOUR
T1 - Reprint of
T2 - Effects of maternal work incentives on youth crime
AU - Corman, Hope
AU - Dave, Dhaval
AU - Kalil, Ariel
AU - Reichman, Nancy E.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors are grateful to Dhiman Das for compiling the crime data and Farzana Razack for excellent research assistance. We thank Laura Argys, Michael Leeds, and Jody Sindelar for helpful comments. Research reported in this publication was supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01HD086223 . The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/6
Y1 - 2018/6
N2 - This study exploits differences in the implementation of welfare reform in the United States across states and over time to identify causal effects of maternal work incentives, and by inference employment, on youth arrests between 1988 and 2005, the period of time during which welfare reform unfolded. We consider both serious and minor crimes as classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, consider differential effects by the youth's gender and age, investigate the extent to which effects were stronger in states with more stringent work incentive policies and larger welfare caseload declines, and use a number of different model specifications to assess robustness and patterns. We find that welfare reform led to reduced arrests for minor crimes among youth ages 15–17 years by 9–11%, with similar estimates for males and females, but that it did not affect youth arrests for serious crimes. The results from this study add to a scant knowledge base about the effects of maternal employment on adolescent behavior by exploiting a large-scale social experiment that greatly increased employment of low-skilled women. The results also provide some support for the widely-embraced argument that welfare restrictions discourage undesirable social behavior, not only of mothers, but also of the next generation.
AB - This study exploits differences in the implementation of welfare reform in the United States across states and over time to identify causal effects of maternal work incentives, and by inference employment, on youth arrests between 1988 and 2005, the period of time during which welfare reform unfolded. We consider both serious and minor crimes as classified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, consider differential effects by the youth's gender and age, investigate the extent to which effects were stronger in states with more stringent work incentive policies and larger welfare caseload declines, and use a number of different model specifications to assess robustness and patterns. We find that welfare reform led to reduced arrests for minor crimes among youth ages 15–17 years by 9–11%, with similar estimates for males and females, but that it did not affect youth arrests for serious crimes. The results from this study add to a scant knowledge base about the effects of maternal employment on adolescent behavior by exploiting a large-scale social experiment that greatly increased employment of low-skilled women. The results also provide some support for the widely-embraced argument that welfare restrictions discourage undesirable social behavior, not only of mothers, but also of the next generation.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.labeco.2018.05.002
DO - 10.1016/j.labeco.2018.05.002
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85047188069
VL - 52
SP - 193
EP - 209
JO - Labour Economics
JF - Labour Economics
SN - 0927-5371
ER -