No abstract

We examine the life course transitions into and from families headed by unmarried cohabiting couples for a recent cohort of American children. Life table estimates, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth mother-child files, indicate about one in four children will live in a family headed by a cohabiting couple sometime during childhood. Economic uncertainty is an important factor determining whether children in single-parent families subsequently share a residence with a mother's unmarried partner. Moreover, virtually all children in cohabiting-couple families will experience rapid subsequent changes in family status. Our estimates provide a point of departure for future work on children's exposure to parental cohabitation and its social and economic implications.

Marriage promotion policies should focus on lowering rates of nonmarital childbearing. Reductions in nonmarital childbearing, however, may not eliminate long-standing discrepancies in marriage rates between black and white women.

This study assesses the stability of Americans' health insurance status over a four-year period. Relatively few Americans were continuously uninsured for the four years 1996 to 1999, but a sizable number of the uninsured lacked a stable source of coverage. At least as many people were repeatedly uninsured as experienced a single gap in otherwise stable coverage. Given these dynamics, policymakers should think of "uninsured" as referring not to people, but rather to gaps in coverage over time. Reforms that stop short of universal coverage should be evaluated in terms of their likely effects on the continuity and stability of coverage.

Our objectives are to describe the policies adopted after PRWORA, which vary across states, to test for common underlying policy concepts, demonstrating how these policies are interrelated, and to examine whether policy stringency diffused to neighboring states results in greater policy stringency across all states over time. We convert textual TANF welfare guidelines into empirically derived policy dimensions and use the derived quantitative scores to describe variation and change in welfare policy dimensions across status during the 1996-2003 post-welfare-reform period. Copyright (c) 2006 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Do family life course and migration events combine to improve or hurt family economic well‐being? The interaction effects of family life course events (i.e. became married, had a child, became separated/divorced) with migration are seldom conceptualised and measured in research on the economic well‐being of families. The more usual focus of the migration literature is on family and household structure rather than on family life course processes. Based on life course transition theory and longitudinal population survey data for the 1996–1999 and 2001–2003 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we utilise random coefficients models in an event‐history framework to provide new evidence on how before‐ and after‐migration life course events affect post‐migration family employment, family income and family poverty, for inter‐ and intra‐state migrants. The results show that, net the effect of factors selecting families and individuals to migrate, both inter‐ and intra‐state migration have negative impacts on family employment, poverty levels and income levels, but interstate migrants experience positive income growth. Separation and divorce markedly intensify the negative effects, but becoming married consistently interacts with migration to improve family economic well‐being. The causal order of family life course events and migration matters, with childbirth and separation/divorce after migration being particularly harmful to family economic well‐being. These effects are not mediated by state economic conditions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Why did some states adopt stringent TANF‐eligibility policies toward immigrants, while others implemented more lenient rules throughout the post‐1996 welfare reform period? We use immigrant‐specific welfare rule measures to examine predominant theoretical frameworks for understanding state stringency in welfare policy. Analysis, utilizing a simultaneous equations modeling (SEM) strategy, uses annual data for all states. Results show consistent support for the median voter (primarily, the percent of liberal voters) theoretical explanation for less stringent state welfare eligibility rules regarding immigrants. While the size of the Social‐Security‐recipient population (tax capacity indicator) and perhaps unacceptable reproductive behavior (teen birth rate) relate to more stringent rules, key state economic and fiscal characteristics (i.e., per capita welfare expenditures, per capita personal income) explain less stringent TANF eligibility rules. Importantly, recent immigrant population concentration patterns (in new and traditional destination states) add to the theoretical explanation of less stringent state TANF immigrant eligibility policies.

Changes in individual or family circumstances cause many Americans to experience gaps and transitions in public and private health insurance. Using data from the 2004–2007 Survey of Income and Program Participation, this article updates earlier analyses of insurance gaps and transitions. Eighty-nine million people (one third of non-elderly Americans) were uninsured for at least one month during those four years. Approximately twenty-three million lost insurance more than once. The analyses call attention to the continuing instability and insecurity of health insurance, can inform implementation of national reforms, and establish a recent baseline that will be helpful in evaluating the reforms’ effects on coverage stability.