Conventional wisdom holds that women on welfare will be better off in the long run if they take a job, even if it means initially having less money to spend on their and their children's needs. Underlying this thinking is the belief that women who take low-paying jobs will eventually move up to higher paying jobs either with their current employer or by changing employers. This paper examines the employment transitions of young women focusing on the likelihood that women who turn to the welfare system for support will make the transition from low-paying to high-paying jobs. The data are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Based on the experiences of women who never received welfare, an estimated one-quarter of young women who received welfare could be firmly established in jobs paying more than $9.50 an hour by ages 26 and 27. An additional 40 percent would work steadily but in low-paying jobs, and more than one-third would work only sporadically. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Wisconsin Press andThe Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Human Resources. ABSTRACT Politicians, the press, and the public have become increasingly worried about welfare becoming a "lifestyle" in which women have multiple births both to increase their incomes and to prolong their stays on the welfare roles. Such concerns have given rise to policy proposals such as the "family cap" which would deny welfare recipients higher welfare payments if they have another child while on welfare. This paper examines the relationship between welfare and births to women who already have a child, using data on young mothers from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Ifind that variations in welfare benefit levels and the incremental benefit have no statistically significant impacts on the subsequent childbearing decisions of young mothers in general, nor on the subsequent childbearing decisions of women who received welfare in particular. Furthermore, mothers who received welfare to support theirfirst children are no more likely to have additional children in any given year through the age of 23.

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Using data from the 1997 and 1999 National Surveys of America's Families, the authors examine the consequences of state welfare policies and practices on the living arrangements of low-income families with children. Results from a multivariate difference-in-difference-in-differences model suggest that more effective collection of child support and family cap policies are correlated with declines in single parenting and increases in dual parenting. Other policies such as sanctions and special restrictions that apply to two-parent families have no clear, consistent association with living arrangements. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

This article uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort Mother‐Child files to explore the idea that child well‐being can be improved by encouraging and enhancing parental marriage. I consider how children’s living arrangements, the stability of parental marriages, and changes in living arrangements are related to children’s behavior and cognitive test scores. Although there is some evidence that children living with their married parents, even parents in unstable marriages, have better outcomes than children living in certain nonmarital arrangements, the findings vary across domains and specifications, and the effect sizes are generally small. Thus, any benefits of policies aimed improving child well‐being by encouraging and enhancing parental marriage are likely to be modest at best.