Welfare use and children’s longer-term achievement

Abstract

We investigate the effects of mothers’ welfare use on children’s longer-term performance. To address issues of improper comparison groups and the endogenous nature of welfare participation, we focus on less-educated single mothers and adopt a correction function approach. Data are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 – Children and Young Adult from 1994 to 2010. Estimation results confirm the positive longer-term effects of mothers’ welfare use. On average, a child whose mother used welfare in all 20 quarters after childbirth experiences a 0.56-point increase in their yearly high school grade point average, is 12% more likely to graduate from high school and earns $1112.76 more in the first-observed income than a child whose mother does not.