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Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives (1998)

Chapter: 6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform

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Suggested Citation:"6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform." National Research Council. 1998. Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6133.
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Suggested Citation:"6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform." National Research Council. 1998. Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6133.
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Suggested Citation:"6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform." National Research Council. 1998. Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6133.
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Suggested Citation:"6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform." National Research Council. 1998. Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6133.
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Suggested Citation:"6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform." National Research Council. 1998. Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6133.
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Suggested Citation:"6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform." National Research Council. 1998. Welfare, the Family, and Reproductive Behavior: Research Perspectives. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6133.
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6 Changing Family Formation Behavior Through Welfare Reform Rebecca Maynard, Elisabeth Boehnen, Tom Corbett, and Gary San(lefur, with lane Mostly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the signature program of federal welfare policy and the traditional focal point of welfare reform discus- sions, was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) when Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (hereafter PRWORA) on August 22, 1996. Among other things, this legislation ends entitlement to program benefits and devolves program authority to the states in the form of block grants or fixed federal fiscal contributions. PRWORA sets forth four principal goals: (1) to provide assistance to needy families so that children may be cared for in their own homes; (2) to end the dependency of needy parents on government support by promoting job preparation, employment, and marriage; (3) to prevent and reduce the incidence of out-of-wedlock and teen pregnancies and births and to establish annual numerical goals for preventing and reducing the incidence of these pregnancies; and (4) to encourage the formation and maintenance of two- parent families (U.S. House of Representatives, 1996b). The goals of PRWORA mirror those of many state welfare reform demon- strations that were initiated under what were termed Section 1115 waivers of federal welfare policies.] By the mid-199Os, states were proposing sweeping and dramatic changes in their AFDC programs, with strong encouragement from the 1Section 1115 of the Social Security Act, added in 1962, authorized research and experimentation with federal welfare policies. In the 1980s and l990s, Section 1115 became the means by which states endeavored to initiate welfare reforms involving departures from requirements or principles of federal law. 134

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 135 Clinton administration. PRWORA was seen as another logical step toward the devolution of welfare policy authority from Washington. Indeed, many states that have submitted new welfare reform plans under PRWORA propose to con- tinue the programs and policies they initiated with these waivers. Whether PRWORA actually results in greater autonomy and flexibility at the state and local levels remains to be seen. It may actually diminish local flexibility in at least two ways. First, it imposes a whole set of expectations and mandates on states, including time limits on federal benefits, restrictions on federal benefits for teen parents, and penalties if states do not achieve enhanced work objectives for recipients. Second, PRWORA increases the fiscal risk of innovation on the part of states by making states responsible for all expenditures above a fixed federal contribution. In effect, this increases the marginal price to states of investing in disadvantaged families with children, thereby discouraging states from investing in areas with uncertain returns. There are important concerns about how states will respond to these policy changes. With the increase in fiscal risks associated with state and local policy, do states have sufficient research evidence from the reforms begun under Section 1115 waiver demonstrations to assume additional responsibility for the design and operation of welfare policy? As described in more detail below, despite the extent of policy innovation and related evaluations over the past decade, we have but modest hard evidence to guide states in many of the important decisions they face as they assume the lead role in providing a social safety net for their poor. The nature of the waiver demonstration programs changed over the years. As the number of demonstrations expanded, the focus of reform initiatives also shifted. The early waiver reforms were directed primarily at enhancing the labor supply of AFDC adult caretakers through work-related policies and programs. More recently, other recipient behaviors have emerged as the focus of attention, including personal decisions about marriage and cohabitation, decisions affecting family stability (for example, divorce and other family composition changes), fertility decisions, and the quality of parenting. Reform activity increasingly was directed toward what were termed "strategies to promote responsible behav- ior" in effect, a new strain of social engineering using welfare policies and rules to encourage socially desirable behaviors. In theory, then, the explosion of waiver-based demonstrations, accompanied by federally mandated rigorous evaluations, promised a wealth of information by which states might make decisions in a postfederal world. This chapter examines those state waiver demonstrations that were designed specifically to influence fertility, family formation, and family maintenance behaviors. It seeks to identify what useful lessons were generated to guide states in their design of welfare programs under TANF. We then reflect on how one might better capitalize on the opportunities for knowledge development presented to us by the massive natural experiment that encompasses both the state welfare reform demonstrations of recent years and those reforms now being implemented under PRWORA.

136 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL MOTIVATION FOR REFORM The recent welfare reform debate that led to the shift from AFDC to TANF was framed by several premises. First, it was widely accepted that AFDC was seriously flawed and required radical repair. Both welfare dependency and child poverty had reached record levels and AFDC was regarded by many state and federal officials as worsening these problems. AFDC caseloads exceeded the 5 million mark in 1994 for the first time, an increase of almost one-third in 5 years. Meanwhile, child poverty rates also increased from 19.6 percent in 1989 to 21.8 percent in 1994.2 Second, it was assumed that the era of "solutions from the center" was over and that the future of welfare innovation should and would derive largely from state and local initiatives. Public officials at all levels, as well as the public itself, argued for devolution of authority over welfare policy from the federal govern- ment to state and local governments, which presumably could craft solutions sensitive to the particular needs of the client population and in accord with local conditions and labor markets. Third, there was growing acceptance that reforms should redirect the goals of welfare policy from fairly straightforward objectives, such as reducing income poverty or increasing the labor market participation of adults in welfare families, toward more complex objectives involving fundamental changes in individual and community behaviors. This change in attitude was affected, in part, by the observations that 89 percent of children on AFDC lived in households with no father present; that the out-of-wedlock birth rate more than tripled after 1960; and that half of children in never-married households and over three-fourths of chil- dren born to teenage mothers ended up on welfare. Finally, it has been assumed that states are the ideal laboratories of reform and, through experimentation, will promote both more effective welfare policies and improved knowledge about effective design, implementation, and management of these policies. Arguably, however, the dominant motivation for reform was the growing perception that welfare, especially AFDC, promoted irresponsible and/or self- destructive behaviors. Historically, welfare has embodied work disincentives, issuing the largest benefits to those who do not work and reducing benefits as earnings rise, sometimes drastically, among those recipients who do work. The result has been marginal tax rates, "notch" effects, and penalties for savings that are greater than those imposed on other income classes. A second argument was that welfare discourages marriage by making it easier for single-parent families than for two-parent families to receive benefits and by treating earnings among single-parent families more generously in calculating welfare benefits. A third 2Since 1994 there has been a decline in both national AFDC caseloads and child poverty. At the time the welfare reform debate was fully engaged, however, it appeared we had the worst of possible worlds worsening welfare dependency and rising rates of child poverty (U.S. House of Repre- sentatives, 1996b).

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 137 notion is that welfare lowers the cost of childbearing among poor women and thus may encourage more childbearing among welfare recipients and teenagers than otherwise would be the case.3 Finally it is argued that welfare creates incentives for noncustodial parents not to report their child support payments or to avoid their child support responsibilities, since all but a modest amount of child support payments were used to offset AFDC benefits rather than to increase support of the children. Policy makers and analysts began focusing on incentive issues in the 1960s, when they set up the various negative income tax experiments. However, it was not until the waiver authority vested in the Secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) was liberalized in the 1980s that states began to explore, on a large scale and systematically, alternatives for responding to these issues. Table 6-1 classifies waivers into several major types. As the last column of Table 6-1 shows, by August 1996, 42 states had applied for one or more waivers of federal welfare regulations and the federal government had approved 452 separate state waivers of welfare policies. Column 1 of Table 6-1 shows that 33 states had received waivers of 46 provisions related to the eligibil- ity criteria for unemployed parents. As we move across the top of the table, we see that 40 states had waivers that changed more than 150 provisions related to ongoing program participation requirements. Thirty-seven states had waivers changing 142 provisions related to benefits and services. And 37 states had waivers changing 107 provisions related to the treatment of earnings and assets in the calculation of benefits. As the pace of waiver requests increased in the 1990s, so too did the com- plexity of the proposed policy changes. Many of the more recent waiver requests reflected substantial "borrowing" of ideas from other states and jurisdictions and "bundling" of policy changes to form complex and sometimes radically different welfare policies. Over time, state reforms became increasingly ambitious and were more likely to encompass multiple goals: promoting labor supply, encour- aging family formation and stability, encouraging school attendance, mandating immunization of children, altering fertility decisions, and promoting improved parenting. So too, more reforms focused on target populations other than the adult caretaker children in the assistance group, minor teenage parents receiv- ing assistance, immigrant beneficiaries, and nonresident fathers of recipient chil- dren. Many reforms included multiple strategies for achieving these various goals: testing a variety of behavioral incentives for various household members and, in some cases, nonresident parents; testing incentives for employers to hire recipients; and testing incentives designed to alter welfare agency cultures. There 3some have even argued that many teens may have babies just to get welfare and be able to set up independent homes. so too, some have argued that many welfare mothers have additional children in order to increase their grants. The research base fails to support these claims (see further discus- sion below).

138 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL TABLE 6-1 Number of Waivers of Federal Welfare Policies as of August 1996, by Type and State Number of Different Waiver Provisions Related To Eligibility Ongoing Welfare Benefits Income for Participation and and Asset Benefits Requirements Services Disregards Total States with Provision 3340373742 Total Provisions 46157142107452 Arizona 11316 Arkansas 01102 California 128516 Colorado 01124 Connecticut 216312 Delaware 155314 Florida 234514 Georgia 134210 Hawaii 20103 Illinois 062210 Indiana 254314 Iowa 057315 Kansas 343414 Louisiana 03104 Maine 05319 Maryland 175417 Massachusetts 165315 Michigan 15039 Minnesota 21238 Mississippi 135110 Missouri 142411 Montana 233311 Nebraska 134414 New Hampshire 253414 New York 03205 North Carolina 164213 North Dakota 11002 Ohio 155314 Oklahoma 12418 Oregon 234312 Pennsylvania 296623 South Carolina 195722 South Dakota 11114 Tennessee 174517 Texas 173213 Utah 22228 Vermont 11215 Virginia 175215 Washington 02136 West Virginia 1 427 Wisconsin 276318 Wyoming 03216 SOURCES: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (various years). See also U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1997).

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 139 also was substantial variation in the focus of the various state welfare demonstra- tions and in the particulars of the individual initiatives.4 Some common themes do, however, appear in the waivers. As Table 6-2 shows, the most common waiver provisions of the majority of approved demon- strations fall within four categories of change: (1) eligibility of two-parent fami- lies, 34 states; (2) welfare participation requirements, 40 states; (3) benefits and services, 37 states; and (4) income and assets disregards, 37 states. With regard to the eligibility of two-parent families for benefits, 34 states eliminated the 100-hour work rule (discussed below) and 25 states expanded eligibility for unemployed parents; 40 states required ongoing work participation of some form, including mandatory participation in work-related activities (36 states) and financial incentives and sanctions imposed depending on work par- ticipation (30 states). Many states (37) made changes in their benefit structure and services: 25 states obtained waivers designed explicitly to impose time limits on benefits, while 22 states chose to expand transitional child care and Medicaid programs to ease the financial burden of moving from welfare to work. Waivers were obtained by 21 states to impose family caps on benefits to discourage (or at least not reward) childbearing among welfare recipients. Many states obtained waivers to liberalize their policies regarding the use of income and assets in the calculation of welfare benefits. Some increased the value of an automobile (26) or other assets (23) individuals could own and still receive public assistance, and some increased the amount of earned income that is disregarded in computing benefit amounts (25~. FAMILY STRUCTURE AS THE FOCUS OF REFORM State waiver demonstrations systematically explored remedies for the per- ceived adverse behavioral consequences associated with AFDC. Other than improving labor market attachment, nowhere has this search been more vigorous than in the area of family structure. Moreover, while PRWORA changes myriad aspects of the economic and social safety net, the provisions related to family structure have been especially important in the political debate over the reforms. Two specific areas have attracted the greatest public attention in the welfare reform discussions, in large part because of their anticipated links to behavioral consequences that could change the future of poverty and welfare policy family caps (also termed child exclusion provisions) and the unemployed parent (UP, or two-parent family) provisions. Family caps, the policy of not adjusting cash assistance benefits when AFDC recipients have additional children, reflect a relatively new and, to many, radical 4Considerable variability prevailed in the number and mix of provisions implemented in states (and sometimes within local areas). For instance, although many states requested waivers to make changes in the benefit eligibility rules for two-parent (or unemployed-parent) families, only two of those provisions were present in waivers granted to large numbers of states (see Table 6-2).

140 CHANGING FAMILY FORMATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH WELFARE REFORM TABLE 6-2 Common Provisions of State Welfare Waiver Demonstrations: 1986-August 1996 Provision Number of States Eligibility of Two-Parent Families for Benefits Elimination of 100-hour work rule Expanded eligibility for unemployed parents Ongoing Welfare Participation Requirements Mandatory participation in work-related activities Financial incentives and sanctions Financial sanctions Financial incentives School attendance and/or performance for children and/or teenage parents Children must receive appropriate immunizations and health services Teenage parents must live at home or in supervised settings Recipients must cooperate with child support enforcement Participants must have self-sufficiency plans Changes in Benefits and Services Time limits on benefits Expansions in transitional child care and Medicaid Caps on benefits based on initial family size (family caps) Cash-out of food stamp benefits JOBS' services for noncustodial parents Increases in the child support pass-through Changes in Income and Asset Disregards Increases in limit on value of an automobile Increases in resource limits Increases in earnings disregard Expansions in disregards for college assistance, work study, or student earnings 34 34 25 40 36 30 28 5 25 19 17 13 13 37 25 22 21 13 12 10 37 26 23 25 13 NOTE: This table includes only provisions found in 10 or more state waivers. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Fam lies (various years). See also U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1997). change in welfare policy. New Jersey was the first state to implement family caps, doing so on an experimental basis in 1992. In contrast, virtually all states had AFDC-UP programs as of July 1990, although UP recipients remained only a small portion of the AFDC caseload. Between 1961, when federal legislation allowed states to offer AFDC to two-parent families, and 1988, when the Family Support Act mandated that all states offer AFDC coverage to poor, two-parent families in which one worker had a recent work history, only about half of the states voluntarily enacted AFDC-UP programs. Less than 10 percent of the total AFDC caseload represented UP families. Recent reforms related to family caps and the unemployed parent policies share programmatic goals with PRWORA

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 141 and are of special interest to states as they design and implement their TANF reforms.5 Family Cap Rules Generally the family cap provisions under the waivers in effect at the time PRWORA was passed contained the stipulation that an AFDC family would not receive additional cash assistance for those children born while the family was receiving AFDC benefits. Under PRWORA, states have the option of imposing family caps, but are not required to do so. By the time PRWORA passed, 21 states had obtained federally approved waivers containing family cap provisions (Table 6-3~. States were given the flexibility to modify existing waiver terms and conditions under PRWORA, though many chose not to do so, at least in the short run. The New Jersey family cap, implemented in 1992 as a provision of the state's Family Development Program, has been the most widely publicized such provision and became somewhat of a model for other states. Under it, AFDC families received no assistance for a child born more than 10 months after AFDC application (there also was a 10-month grace period for current recipients), with three exceptions: (1) the first child of a minor already included in an AFDC grant; (2) families who left AFDC due to earnings, remained employed for 90 days, then terminated employment for good cause; and (3) families who left AFDC for any reason and remained off welfare for 12 consecutive months. New Jersey also offered an additional earned income disregard for employed mothers with infants who are subject to the cap, allowing them to keep more of their earnings. Family cap initiatives were characterized by two features during the pre- PRWORA period. First, as in New Jersey, the "typical" family cap provision was not initiated as a stand-alone provision, but was embedded within larger, more complex welfare reform initiatives.6 Seventeen of the twenty-one states with family caps overlap with states that obtained waivers altering their two-parent family provisions (see further below). Second, there existed considerable varia 5There are additional waiver provisions and goals in PRWORA that may also have an affect on family formation (such as requiring minor parents to live with an adult). However, this chapter limits its focus to the family cap and the two-parent family provisions. 6For example, the New Jersey Family Development Program includes expanded employment, education, and training services; provisions reducing the marriage penalties; and modifications to earnings disregards. The Virginia Independence Program (VIP) contains a family cap provision as well as provisions for time limits, earnings subsidies, modifications to income disregards, changes in Jobs sanctions and exemptions, and links between benefits and school attendance. North Carolinas Work First demonstration includes a family cap as well as benefit time limits, modifications to income disregards, elimination of the 1 00-hour rule, and changes in Jobs sanctions and exemptions (u.s. Department of Health and Human services, various dates, and u.s. Department of Health and Human services, 1997).

142 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE ~FO~ TABLE 6-3 Key Features of Family Cap Provisions of State Waiver Demonstrations: 1986-August 1996 Liberalize Treatment Time Limit of Earninl DateDate Exclusion and Child State and Program NameApprovedImplemented Statewide (months) Support Number of states with 21 19 20 8 provision AZ-(EMPOWER) Employing5/95ll/95 X 10 X and Moving People Off Welfare and Encouraging Responsibility AR AFDC-M4/947/94 10 CA (WPDP) Work Pays3/944/94 X 10 X Demonstration Project (CWPDP-M) Work Pays8/968/96 X 24 Demonstraton Project Modified CT Reach Jobs 1st12/9512/95 X 10 DE BETTER CHANCE5/9510/95 X 10 FL Family Responsibility Act6/966/96d X 10 GA Personal Accountability11/931/94 X 24 and Responsibility Act IL Work and Responsibility9/959/95d X 10 IN IMPACT12/945/95 X 10 IMPACT M8/968/96d X KS Actively Creating8/968/96 X 10 Tomorrow MD Family Investment8/9510/95 X 10 Program MA Transitional AFDC8/9511/95 X 10 Program (Welfare Reform '95) MS New Direction Modifications 8/95 11/95 X 10

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. remonstrations: 143 Liberalized Time Limit Exclusion (months) Treatment of Earnings and Child Support Exemptions Benefits Vary by Number of Childrena Conceived During Birth to Residence Period of Incest/Rape Minorb RequirementC No Benefits 20 8 3 14 8 5 6 10 X X X 10 X X 10 X X 24 10 10 10 24 10 10 10 10 10 10 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

144 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE ~FO~ TABLE 6-3 Continued Liberalize Treatment Time Limit of Earning Date Date Exclusion and Child State and Program Name Approved Implemented Statewide (months) Support NE Welfare Reform 2/95 10/95 X 10 X Demonstration Project NJ Family Development 7/92 10/92 X 10 X Program NC WORK First 2/96 2/96d X 10 OK Mutual Agreement 3/95 3/950 SC Family Independence 3/96 3/96d X 10 Program (FIP) TN Families First 7/96 7/96d X 10 VA Virginia Independence 7/95 7/95 X 10 X Program (VIP) WI Parental And Family 4/92 7/94 10 Act (PFR)e Work Not Welfare 11/93 1/95 10 AFDC Benefit Cap 6/94 11/96 X 10 Demonstration Project (ABC)f NOTE: Twenty-one states have implemented a total of 25 demonstrations that include a family cap provision. In addition, three states, New Hampshire, Texas, and Wyoming require parents to partici- pate in JOBS activities sooner after giving birth to a child conceived while on cash assistance, but continue to increase the cash grant (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1997: Table III). aPercentage of benefits changes as number of children increases. bThese provisions exempt first-born minors already receiving benefits.

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 145 Exemptions Liberalized Treatment Benefits Conceived Time Limit of Earnings Vary by During Exclusion and Child Number of Birth to Residence Period of (months) Support Childrena Incest/Rape Minorb RequirementC No Benefits 10 X X X X 10 X X X 10 X 10 X 10 X X 10 X 10 X 10 X X 10 X X X CThese provisions exempt children not living with the parent. dActual implementation date may be different or program might not have been implemented. Kan sas and Oklahoma appear not to have implemented their family cap policies at all (U. S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1997: Table III). eThis provision applies only to specific population groups, designated by age. fFamily cap is a single waiver and not part of the larger waiver request. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Fami lies (various years).

146 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELF~^FO~ lion in the design and execution of the provisions. Although most states excluded from the cap children born within 10 months of application, two states (California and Illinois) had 24-month exclusions. Most exempted children who were con- ceived through incest or rape. Eight states (Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Wisconsin) exempted the first- born children of minors who were already receiving benefits as a child of a welfare recipient. Six states (Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, New Jersey, and Wisconsin) exempted children conceived while the parent was not receiving benefits. There were also variations by the recipient's age and the birth order of the children. The Kansas waiver permitted a second child to receive benefits; the third child received 50 percent of the benefits normally allotted for an additional dependent; and subsequent children received no benefits. Wisconsin's Parental and Family Responsibility Initiative (which included only recipients under the age of 20 at the beginning of the program) provided 50 percent of the otherwise available benefits for a second child, and no benefits for a third or subsequent child (Center for Law and Social Policy, 1995~. Some states accompanied the family cap provisions with exemptions that changed the treatment of family earnings for women with infants and/or women who received child support. For example, Arizona, Massachusetts, and New Jersey liberalized their treatment of earnings for women with infants. California, Virginia, and Florida exempted child support from countable income, while Ne- braska and Delaware discounted child support in computing countable income. Unemployed Parent Rules Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia obtained waivers to elimi- nate some or all of the eligibility restrictions on two-parent families (Table 6-4~. Under the AFDC-UP program, three primary provisions restricted the benefit eligibility of two-parent families. Under the 100-hour rule, an AFDC-UP family lost eligibility if the principal wage earner was employed for 100 hours or more a month, even if the family' s wages from employment were so low that the family would still be eligible for AFDC. Under the work history requirement, an AFDC- UP family had to demonstrate a "connection to the work force" in one of two ways the principal wage earner must have received or been eligible for unem- ployment compensation benefits or must have had $50 or more of earnings in at least 6 of 13 quarters ending within a year before applying for AFDC. Under the 30-day waiting period requirement, an AFDC-UP family could not receive aid for 30 days after the principal wage earner became unemployed (Center for Law and Social Policy, 1995~. All of the states (including the District of Columbia) with waivers related to the unemployed parent provisions eliminated the 100-hour rule, and 25 states requested, and most received, waivers eliminating both the 100-hour rule and the

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150 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL work history requirements. Eighteen states eliminated all three rules. Eliminat- ing these rules allowed working fathers to remain with their families and report their actual hours of work without loss of benefits to the families. As with the family cap rules, some states obtained multiple waivers with similar provisions. For example, Wisconsin obtained three sets of waivers con- taining provisions dealing with two-parent families, all with somewhat different combinations of rules. Both its Work Not Welfare and Pay for Performance demonstrations eliminated only the 100-hour rule along with other welfare policy changes (time limits in the former case and changes in work requirements and supports in the latter). The Parental and Family Responsibility Initiative, in contrast, eliminated all three of the unemployed parent rules. The majority of states simply eliminated the three specific rules, but a few made more complex policy changes. Florida's Family Transition Program elimi- nated all three rules, but also provided case-by-case exceptions to the 6-month time limit, during which the family's principal wage earner was supposed to complete an employability plan. Missouri's demonstration, the Missouri Fami- lies Mutual Responsibility Plan, Phase I, eliminated the 100-hour rule and work history requirements only for families in which both parents were under 21 years of age. Hawaii's Families Are Better Together based its deprivation criteria on need rather than the unemployment of a parent and eliminated the 100-hour and 30-day rules and the work history requirements. PERSPECTIVES ON THE REFORMS Economic and social theories offer considerable support for these particular welfare reform policies, though empirical support is more suggestive than con- clusive. According to these theories, individuals modify their behaviors in re- sponse to economic incentives and to social and cultural norms. The various reform initiatives impinge upon both incentives and norms in ways that lead social theorists to predict that reforms targeted at fertility and family structure may achieve at least some success. Family Caps The economic arguments that support instituting family caps as a means of reducing fertility among welfare recipients are quite clear. Relative to current policy, welfare recipients who bear additional children will be poorer. In eco- nomic terms, recipients will face a higher net economic cost of bearing additional children than under the former welfare policy a cost equal to the benefit incre- ments for additional children that were paid under the former policy. Economic theory predicts that, ceteris paribus, increasing the net cost of childbearing will encourage some to forgo additional childbearing. An extension of this reasoning would also predict that, at the margin, some women who are deciding whether to

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 151 have a child at all and become dependent on welfare might postpone childbearing until they are able to support the child themselves. But, insofar as the caps apply to second and later children, childless women may substantially discount the nominal "cost" of the new policy in their current childbearing decisions. In practice, it seems unlikely that the change in economic incentives associ- ated with family caps will induce sizable changes in fertility patterns, for two reasons. First, the policy-induced changes in income associated with the future fertility decisions of welfare recipients tend to be relatively small both in pro- portion to the cost of childrearing and in absolute terms.7 Their small absolute size is partly a function of earlier benefit-increment policies, under which the monthly increase in benefits for additional children most often was quite nomi- nal. Moreover, increases in Food Stamp and housing benefits typically will offset portions of the welfare benefit reduction, and Medicaid benefits are unaf- fected by family caps. Second, economic factors are, at best, weakly related to fertility decisions, in large part, we suspect, because of strong mediating influences of noneconomic factors. Nationally, family sizes tend to be inversely correlated with income. Moreover, three-fourths of pregnancies to women who have incomes below the poverty line are unintended, as are 88 percent of the pregnancies to women who have never been married (Brown and Eisenberg, 1995~. Twenty-eight percent of births among never-married women, who are heavily represented among welfare recipients, are the result of unintended pregnancies (Brown and Eisenberg, 1995; Kost and Forrest, 1995~. This is consistent with the fact that over 70 percent of low-income women who report not wanting to become pregnant also report using some form of contraception.8 Advocates of family caps do not rely solely on the expectation of behavioral responses to support their views. The policy discussions about family caps also often invoke principles and values in addition to social and economic theories and research. For example, many of the arguments of legislators in New Jersey and Wisconsin for both the family caps and the suspension of the 100-hour rule were value based. It seemed to matter less that marriage rates rose and divorce and fertility rates fell as a result of the policy changes than it did that everyone understood that society favors marriage and is not willing to reward those having additional children when they cannot adequately support the ones they have already. 7Even prior to family caps, AFDC recipients received widely different benefit increments for individual children, ranging from $24 to $247 per child, depending on the state of residence and family size and structure (u.s. House of Representatives, 1993). 8Nearly 80 percent of first-time teen parents on welfare report using some form of contraception; nearly all report not wanting more children; yet over a 30-month follow-up period, over two-thirds became pregnant again, and half gave birth to a second child (Maynard and Rangarajan, 1994).

152 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL Unemployed Parent Provisions Altering the unemployed parent provisions affects four groups of welfare recipients: (1) those with spouses working in low-wage jobs; (2) those living with spouses who are not working but who could work in low-wage jobs; (3) those with nonresident partners working in low-wage jobs for more than 100 hours per month; and (4) those at the margin of a marital decision. It also could affect those nonrecipients who, on moral or other grounds, have decided to marry and not participate in welfare, even though their spouses have limited earnings potential. Eliminating the 100-hour rule means that, at the margin, some wage earners in two-parent families may increase their work effort beyond their current level, thereby increasing family welfare at the same time that reliance on public assis- tance declines. Some unemployed spouses of welfare recipients may be enticed to seek employment for similar reasons and with similar results. Some couples who previously bypassed marriage or divorced to preserve their welfare eligibil- ity may elect to get or stay married, because the financial loss from doing so is diminished. On the other hand, some nonrecipients could be attracted to welfare as a result of the policy change, because welfare would offer an income supple- ment without jeopardizing the marriage option. Suspension of the 100-hour rule sends two quite clear messages to recipients and nonrecipients: (1) work is valued and (2) so is marriage. Eliminating the "work test" and "waiting periods" is expected to have similar, though somewhat more complicated, effects. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM PRIOR RESEARCH The research basis for the welfare waiver demonstrations and the reform provisions under PRWORA is extremely limited, consisting of studies of family structure and of the determinants of fertility behavior. Many of these studies are discussed in chapters by Klerman and Moffitt that appear elsewhere in this vol- ume. As noted below, more direct tests of the efficacy of the family cap and unemployed parent rules will be forthcoming from the various demonstrations and TANF programs over the next few years. There also is some research from prior welfare reform demonstrations, particularly those that targeted the AFDC- UP population and a handful of demonstration programs for teenage parents that are designed, in part, to modify fertility behavior. Fertility Decisions The decision making that leads to family formation and expansion is very complex. Major differences in fertility rates are associated with income class, cultural identity, age, and marital status. These relationships have been changing

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 153 rapidly over time. Fertility rates are higher among low-income families than among middle- and higher-income families; they are higher among blacks and Hispanics than among whites and Asians; the mean age of first birth has risen to about 23 and the variance has been increasing; and roughly 30 percent of all births are out-of-wedlock, but vastly higher proportions of poor women and teenagers are unmarried when they give birth (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1995~. Several studies that have examined the welfare incentives for childbearing have found a slight association between AFDC and increases in childbearing, but this association is not characteristic of all recipients (Plotnick, 1990; Lundberg and Plotnick, 1990; Gottschalk, 1990, 1992; Moffitt, 1992; Haveman and Wolfe, 1994; Plotnick and Lundberg, 1995~. In fact, in 1995 Moffitt argued that we do not know enough to characterize these findings as evidence of an actual effect of AFDC on childbearing (Moffitt, 1995; but see Moffitt, Chapter 4, in this vol- ume). Moreover, the research suggests that impacts on fertility decisions may have been mediated by funding for family planning. Federal support for family planning and reproductive health issues offers real returns to taxpayers from a variety of sources, most notably lower rates of infant and neonatal death, lower fertility rates among low-income women who are at high risk of tightly spaced births, and fewer low-birthweight babies (Meter and McFarlane, 1994~. Although there is limited evidence that these funds re- duce teenage pregnancy rates (Haveman et al. 1997), they clearly reduce teenage birth rates through increasing abortions (Olsen and Weed, 1986; Moore et al., 1994~. The behavioral research on the effects of welfare on fertility is comple- mented by a limited body of demonstration research that tests various changes in welfare and social service policies designed to reduce fertility among teenage parents already on welfare or at high risk of going onto welfare. The eight such programs with strong evaluations represent four different strategies for address- ing the needs of teenage parents, albeit with overlapping features: (1) employ- ment and training programs serving significant numbers of teenage parents (Job Corps and Job Start); (2) comprehensive education and training programs tar- geted specifically at teen parents (New Chance and Project Redirection); (3) welfare-based education and employment programs that mandate education and job preparation services for teenage parent welfare recipients (Ohio Learnfare and the Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration); and (4) health-focused pro- grams targeted at first-time parents, many or all of whom are teenagers (the Teenage Parent Health Care Program and the Elmira Nurse Home Visiting pro- gram). The table in the appendix to this chapter provides references for the evaluations of these programs. These demonstrations are relevant insofar as roughly half of all welfare recipients are current or former teenage parents, and the rates of repeat pregnan- cies and births are especially high among this group (Jacobson and Maynard,

154 CHANGING FAMILY FORMATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH WELFARE REFORM 1995~. Recognizing that subsequent pregnancies and births would interfere with the central education and employment goals of these programs, all of the demon- stration programs except the two youth employment programs devoted consider- able resources to helping the young mothers control their fertility, offering family planning services and counseling as part of the basic intervention. Still, repeat pregnancy rates were high above 50 percent in all programs except the teenage parent health care program (28 percent over 18 months). Only the two health-focused programs were successful in reducing the repeat preg- nancy rates (Table 6-5~. The Teenage Parent Health Care Demonstration, which involved home visitor services by trained social workers, reduced the repeat TABLE 6-5 Impacts of Welfare-Related Demonstrations on Fertility Behavior of Teenage Parents Outcome Measure Program Pregnancies Abortions Births Estimated Program Impact (percent of control/comparison group mean) Job Start 12.7a n.a. New Chance 7.5b 34.2a Project Redirection 6.9 -41 .5b Ohio Learnfare n.a. n.a. Teen Parent Welfare 17. 1a 8.4 2o.oa 4.3 Demonstration 0.1 -16.9 6.6b Teen Parent Health Care -57.1 a n.a. n.a. Elmira Nurse Home Visiting -43.1 a n.a. n.a. Participant group mean Job Start 76.1% n.a. 67.8% New Chance 57.0% 14.9% 28.4% Project Redirection 3.3c 0.3c 2.4c Ohio Learnfare n.a. n.a. 26.7% Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration 1.0c o. 16c o.64c Teen Parent Health Care 28.0% n.a. n.a. Elmira Nurse Home Visiting 0.7c n.a. n.a. NOTE: Data for the Job Start evaluation pertain to 4 years after sample enrollment; for Job Corps 4 years after enrollment; for New Chance 18 months after enrollment; for Project Redirection 5 years after enrollment; for Ohio Learnfare 3 years following enrollment; for the Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration 2 years after enrollment; for the Teen Parent Health Care Demonstration 18 months after enrollment; and for the Elmira Nurse Home Visiting Demonstration, 46 months after enroll- ment. n.a. = not available aSignificant at the 10% level. bSignificant at the 5% level. CMean number of occurrences. SOURCE: Sources of data presented in this table are detailed in the appendix to this chapter.

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 155 pregnancy rate by an estimated 57 percent, and the Elmira Home Visiting Dem- onstration reduced the rate by 43 percent. Pregnancy rates increased significantly among participants in both the Job Start and the New Chance demonstrations (by 13 percent and 8 percent respec- tively). One can only speculate as to why these programs would increase preg- nancy rates. However, one possible explanation includes their role in increasing opportunities for the young women to meet men, their promotion of higher self- esteem, and their facilitation of independent living, while failing to improve contraceptive practices. Among New Chance participants, the abortion rate also increased sufficiently to offset the higher pregnancy rate, whereas in Project Redirection and the Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstrations, the abortion rate declined sufficiently to show increases in the birth rates among program partici- pants, even though the repeat pregnancy rates had not increased significantly. These differential patterns of abortion likely reflect differences in the philoso- phies of program staff and in access to contraceptive services. The Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration, for example, had an explicit policy of not making referrals for abortion. The upcoming evaluation of the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training program, which is the employment support program introduced with the Family Support Act of 1988, will include measures of fertility effects. However, none of the intervening evaluations of welfare reforms for adult recipients has measured such effects, in part because fertility control was not a major goal of the interven- tions. Most of these evaluations relied on limited data collected from state welfare and Unemployment Insurance data systems. Family Formation, Dissolution, and Single Parenthood The overwhelming message from this research is that the various welfare reforms are likely to have modest impacts on family formation and fertility (see Chapter 4~. In several studies using national databases, researchers have found weak or no relationships between the generosity of welfare benefits and mar- riage, divorce, and out-of-wedlock childbearing (Ellwood and Bane, 1985; Lund- berg and Plotnick, 1990; Haveman and Wolfe, 1994; McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994; Moffitt, 1995; Plotnick and Lundberg, 1995~. The effects that were ob- served are small in relation to the quite dramatic decreases in marriage, increases in divorce, and skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock childbearing observed in society (Moffitt, 1992; Brown and Eisenberg, 1995; Lichter, 1995~. Given that the research has relied on analysis of time trends and cross-site variation in state- level data, we are cautioned that a "major ambiguity in the conclusion . . . is whether any observed relationship between welfare and nonmarital childbearing is real . . . or reflects the effects of other unmeasured cross-state differences in... environments.... [Wie are left with only the suggestion of an effect" (Moffitt, 1995: 172~.

156 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL Some researchers have begun to look at these issues with national longitudi- nal datasets, from different aspects. One study examines whether patterns of childbearing and marriage affect the earnings potential and general economic well-being of families (Brien and Willis, 1997~. Finding relatively modest ef- fects, the researchers speculate that one reason is that the current welfare system discourages men from marrying the mothers of their children. An emerging literature suggests that welfare-dependent mothers, particularly young black mothers, are not especially interested in marrying the fathers of their children or, in most cases, even in pursuing a formal child support order (Polit, 1992; Maynard, 1993; Quint et al., 1994b). Historically, there has been little or no financial gain to formal child support for recipients of public assistance, which accounts for the father's diminished willingness to contribute formal support when under order to make regular payments. Edin and Lein (1997) report that many young unwed mothers receive informal child support from the fathers of their children. In these studies, young women gave various reasons for their lack of interest in marriage, which can be summarized as follows: Men are not reliable sources of economic and emotional support; welfare can at least be relied upon for economic support. The best available evidence from the research suggests that rule changes may only minimally affect the likelihood that mothers in AFDC-UP families will end up as single parents. The experimental research on family formation and dissolu- tion is limited to that from the negative income tax experiments of the late 1960s and 1970s. The somewhat controversial results from these demonstrations sug- gest that more generous income support offered under the experiments had, at most, modest impacts on family formation and stability (Cain, 1987; Hannan and Tuma, 1990; Cain and Wissoker, 1990~. Using longitudinal state-level data, another study found no evidence that the AFDC-UP program destabilized two- parent families, and found some evidence suggesting that the program may have encouraged family stability (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1992~. None of the welfare reform demonstration evaluations of the 1980s focusing specifically on the AFDC population has examined the effects on this set of outcomes, even though many of them included program provisions that, theoretically, could have affected family formation, stability, and fertility decisions. Moreover, none of the early evaluations of demonstrations coming out of the Family Support Act of 1988 focused on the family formation outcomes.9 We do know from the many welfare reform demonstrations of the 1980s, as well as from evaluations of many other employment and training programs tar- geted at disadvantaged young men, that they have modest or no effects on work behavior and earnings. The Job Training Partnership Act programs led to mod 9There are ongoing demonstrations of the suspension of the 100-hour rule in California, Utah, and Wisconsin. Each of these projects has serious implementation and evaluation design flaws, as well as poor outcome measures (Birnbaum and Wiseman, 1996).

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 157 est. but statistically significant, gains in employment and earnings of disadvan- taged men (Bloom et al., 1994~. The subsidized employment demonstrations of the 1980s were only modestly successful in getting male AFDC recipients into low-wage jobs, but at high cost (Brock et al., 1993~. And the mandatory welfare- to-work programs of the past decade, for example California's welfare reform demonstrations, have led to relatively modest changes in the employment behav- ior of men (Gueron and Pauly, 1991; Friedlander and Burtless, 1994~. We might infer from the modest changes in employment behavior that these policies have had little to no effect on decisions about family formation and dissolution. However, few of these studies have looked specifically at such outcomes. Two of the evaluations that have addressed them focused on teenage parents and service-oriented interventions rather than financial incentives for working the Teenage Parent Welfare Demonstration and the New Chance dem- onstration. In both cases, the programs had no significant impact on family structure over a 2- to 3-year follow-up period (Maynard, 1993; Quint et al., 1994a, 1994b). PROSPECTIVE FINDINGS FROM THE WAIVER DEMONSTRATIONS In virtually all cases in which states received Section 1115 waiver authority to explore new welfare policies, they were required to commission rigorous evaluations of their reforms and to monitor their fiscal impacts to ensure that the innovations were cost neutral with respect to federal fiscal liability. In all but a handful of cases, these evaluations have entailed randomly assigning welfare recipients or prospective recipients to the old or new welfare provisions and monitoring their outcomes over several years. In most instances, the studies have been designed principally to assess the efficacy of the new welfare regime, often a package of reforms bundled together, relative to a counterfactual, usually con- sisting of the remains of the old AFDC program. These studies offered the federal government evidence to enforce the fiscal neutrality provisions required under the 1115 waivers. They also are relevant to individual state deliberations about whether to retain, modify, or abandon their waiver reforms. The evaluations are much more limited in their ability to enhance our general understanding of the behavioral choices leading to and perpetuating dependency and/or poverty. Seldom were evaluation designs constructed that would isolate the effects of particular reform provisions, contrast alternative reform plans, or disaggregate the importance of particular components to any change in outcomes. The high degree of variation in the specific provisions related to a particular area of reform and the bundling of reforms complicate any such efforts to sort out the causal paths to outcomes (Table 6-6~. For instance, only Wisconsin implemented demonstrations of family cap provisions by themselves and, even in Wisconsin, the caps were introduced in many sites as part of larger reforms.

158 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOOT TABLE 6-6 Elements of Reform Bundles: Examples of States with Waivers Including Family Cap Provisions: 1986-August 1996 Family Cap Provisions Time Limit Liberalize Exclusion Treatment State and Program Name Exemptions for (months) and Child Number of states with provision AZ Employing and Moving People Off Welfare and Encouraging Responsibility (EMPOWER) AR AFDC-M 19 Rape or incest/conceived 10 when not on welfare Rape or incest/birth to minorb 10 X CA Work Pays Demonstration Project Rape or incest 10 X (WPDP) Work Pays Demonstration Project None 24 Modified (CWPDP-M) CT Reach Jobs 1st (Fair Chance) Rape or incest; birth to minor, 10 residence;C conceived when not on welfare DE BETTER CHANCE Rape or incest; birth to minor, 10 X residence; conceived when not on welfare FL Family Responsibility Act None 10 X GA Personal Accountability and Responsibility Act Rape or incest; birth to minor, 24 residence; conceived when not on welfare Work and Responsibility None 10 IN IMPACT IMPACT M Rape or incest; birth to minor, 10 residence; conceived when not on welfare None KS Actively Creating Tomorrow None 10

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. /severs 159 Emily Cap . . ^ovlslons ime Limit Liberalized Benefits Vary gclusion Treatment of Earnings by Number Other Major Reform months) and Child Support of Childrena Provisions (number) 8 X X X X 3 X X Income and asset disregards; time limits; Food Stamp cash-out; two-parent eligibility (4) Learnfare (1) Income and asset disregards; transitional child care and Medicaid; Learnfare (3) Income and asset disregards; benefit re- ductions; time limits; work requirements (4) Income and asset disregards; transitional child care and Medicaid; child support pass- through; work requirements (4) Income and asset disregards; time limits; two-parent eligibility; teens at home; parenting and family planning; child health; Learnfare (7) Two-parent eligibility; work requirements; Learnfare (3) Work requirements; parenting and family planning (2) Time limits (1) Income and asset disregards; benefit reductions; time limits; two-parent eligibility; Food Stamp eligibility; child health; work requirements; Learnfare (8) Reduce transitional child care and Medicaid; cash-out Food Stamps; teens at home; child support; Learnfare (5) Income and asset disregards; time limits; transitional child care and Medicaid; Medicaid expansions; two-parent eligibility; teens at home; child support; Learnfare (8)

160 CHANGING FOGY FORMATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH WELFARE REFORM TABLE 6-6 Continued Family Cap Provisions Time Limit Liberalize Exclusion Treatment State and Program Name Exemptions for (months) and Child MD Family Investment Program Rape or incest MA Transitional AFDC Program None (Welfare Reform '95) MS New Direction Modifications Rape or incest 0 0 x NE Welfare Reform Demonstration Rape or incest; birth to 10 X Project minor, residence NJ Family Development Program Birth to minor; conceived 10 X when not on welfare NC WORK First Rape or incest 10 OK Mutual Agreement None SC Family Independence Program Rape or incest (FIP)d TN Families First 10 Rape or incest; birth to minor 10 VA Virginia Independence Program (VIP) None 10 X

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 16 Emily Cap . . ^ovlslons ime Limit Liberalized Benefits Vary gclusion Treatment of Earnings by Number Other Major Reform months) and Child Support of Childrena Provisions (number) X X X X Income and asset disregards; two-parent eligibility; teens at home; family planning and parenting; child health; work requirements (6) Income and asset disregards; transitional child care and Medicaid; cash-out of Food Stamps; two-parent eligibility; teens at home; child health; child support; work requirements; Learnfare (9) Income and asset disregards; two-parent eligibility; child health; Learnfare (4) Income and asset disregards; reduced benefits; time limits; transitional child care and Medicaid; two-parent eligibility; work requirements; Learnfare (7) Two-parent eligibility; work requirements; employment training; child health Income and asset disregards; time limits; two-parent eligibility; teens at home; child health; child support (6) Income and asset disregards; time limits; transitional child care and Medicaid; two- parent eligibility (4) Income and asset disregards; two-parent eligibility; drug testing and counseling; family planning and parenting; child support; work requirements; Learnfare (7) Income and asset disregards; time limits; two-parent eligibility; child health; child support; work requirements; Learnfare (7) Time limits; child support pass-through; teens at home; child health; work requirements; Learnfare (6)

162 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL TABLE 6-6 Continued Family Cap Provisions Time Limit Liberalize Exclusion Treatment State and Program Name Exemptions for (months) and Child WI Parental and Family None 10 Responsibility Act (PFR)e Work Not Welfare (WNW) Rape or incest; conceived 10 when not on welfare AFDC Benefit Cap Demonstration Rape or incest; birth to 10 Project (ABC)f minor; residence NOTES: Twenty-one states have implemented a total of 25 demonstrations that include family cap . . provlslons. aPercentage of benefits changes as number of children increases. bThese provisions exempt first-born minors already receiving benefits. CThese provisions exempt children not living with the parent. Since these various reforms are being implemented in particular contexts, evaluations typically will generate site- and context-specific findings. For ex- ample, the results of various reforms implemented in a high-benefit state with a strong economy cannot be assumed to apply to low-benefit states and/or states with weak economies; nor can the results of family caps with low-benefit incre- ments for additional children be generalized to circumstances where there are large per capita benefit increments. However, over time it likely will be more feasible to tease out some more generalizable findings from the observed cross- site and cross-time results.~° Evaluation of New Jersey's Family Development Program The preliminary results of the New Jersey Family Development Program illustrate both the complexities in carrying out meaningful evaluations of welfare reform and the limitations of findings produced even under the best of circum- stances. Beginning in August 1993, most of the state's welfare applicants and recipients were converted to the new welfare policies and services, including mandatory work requirements, expanded job training, liberalized eligibility for two-parent families, the family cap, and decreased taxes on earnings for those i°See for example, Gueron and Pauly (1991), FriedIander and Burtless (1994), and Maynard (1997).

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 163 Emily Cap . . ^ovlslons ime Limit Liberalized Benefits Vary gclusion Treatment of Earnings by Number Other Major Reform months) and Child Support of Childrena Provisions (number) X None (0) Time limits; transitional child care and Medicaid; two-parent eligibility (3) None (0) dVouchers are given in lieu of cash benefits. eThis provision applies only to specific population groups, designated by age. fFamily cap is a single waiver and not part of the larger waiver request. SOURCE: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Fami- lies (various years). See also, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1997). having additional children while on welfare. For evaluation purposes, several thousand applicants and recipients in selected counties were randomly assigned to remain on the old welfare policies and thereby serve as a control group or counterfactual. This control group is being compared with about 6,000 randomly selected welfare applicants and recipients participating in the Family Develop- ment Program. For several reasons, however, the emerging results of the evaluations are not especially useful for guiding either state or national policy (O'Neill, 1994; Camasso, 1995; Myers, 1995; Donovan, 1995~. First, they reflect the effects of a complex set of reforms, only one piece of which pertains to the treatment of additional children born to welfare recipients. Economic and social theories predict that changes in economic opportunities and net wages might affect fertil- ity behavior as much as the reform-induced changes in welfare benefits and economic needs resulting from the birth of an additional child. Neither of the two evaluations conducted was designed to disentangle the impacts of these various elements. Second, there was tremendous publicity concerning the development and introduction of the family cap. Not only was New Jersey the first state to imple- ment the policy, but it also was the first state to take a public stand on the issue of whether welfare ought to hold families financially harmless for their decisions to bear additional children. As a result, many control group members believe they have been subject to the family cap provision, even though they have not. In the

164 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL parlance of the evaluation literature, the control group may have been subjected to contamination bias.ll Third, the actual financial consequence of the policy change for families having additional children was quite small. This is because Food Stamp benefits were increased to account for the family size change. Because there was no increase in cash benefits for families having another child under the cap, their Food Stamp benefits increased sufficiently to fill half to two-thirds of the lower cash assistance resulting from the new family cap policy relative to the old AFDC benefit rules. Fourth, there are problems with the measurement of outcomes in the New Jersey demonstration. The primary source of data on births has been the welfare records. Yet, those whose benefits are not increased as a result of a birth (those subject to the cap) are less likely to report the birth to welfare officials than are those in the control group, for whom the reporting of a birth will trigger a benefit increase.l2 Finally, the evaluation design does not lend itself to the measurement of any entry or exit effects. That is, it will not measure any deterrent effect, in the form of either delayed parenting or increased abortion rates. Nor will it measure any possible program entry effects due, for example, to the more generous education and training services. Similar Complexities in Other State Demonstration Evaluations The prospects that state evaluations will sort out empirically any causal links between selected welfare reforms and family outcomes of interest are not favor- able, for a variety of reasons: · There are very few tests of single policy changes or even of a limited number of changes. As is clear from Table 6-6 and would be equally evident from a similar table for the unemployed parent reforms, there are very few pure tests of specific policy changes. For example, there was initial hope that the unemployed parent reforms in several states (California, Utah, and Wisconsin) would provide clear tests of the underlying economic theories. But closer exami- nation of the project and evaluation designs tempered this optimism: "All three experiments with the 100-hour rule are flawed, and problems with both design and implementation reduce the usefulness of the experiment" (Birnbaum and Wiseman, 1996~. Utah's 100-hour rule demonstration, implemented in 1992, 1lA Wall Street Journal article reported survey results suggesting that the controls were as likely as the demonstration participants to believe that the family caps applied to them (Harwood, 1997). 12This differential propensity to report a birth to welfare officials may account for much of the large measured reduction in birth rates reported by the first two studies of fertility effects of New Jersey's reforms (O'Neill, 1994; New Jersey Department of Human Services, 1995). An attempt to collect better data through surveys has resulted in unusually low response rates.

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 165 initially eliminated only the 100-hour rule. In 1995, however, the demonstration was incorporated into the state's Single Parent Employment Demonstration Project (SPEDP), which contains at least 11 other major provisions, making it increasingly difficult to segregate the individual component effects. · There is increased churning and volatility within states. For example, family caps have been introduced in Wisconsin in three different waivers. At least six states with waivers affecting two-parent provisions have modified their state plans. With the passage of PRWORA, we can expect another round of major reforms and policy changes. These planned variations in policy are some- times in response to and other times overlaid on changes in the political, social, and economic climate in the states. · Future support for strong evaluations appears highly uncertain. Under PRWORA, the federal government will not mandate evaluations of new reforms. Rather, it will encourage states to continue expanding their knowledge by provid- ing financial support and sponsoring selected demonstrations. Serious empirical work likely will require investments of state resources or significant contribu- tions from private sources. · There are very difficult technical and methodological challenges to esti- mating the behavioral responses to many of the new reforms. For example, the new generation of reforms intends to change community and agency cultures. Classical experiments with random assignment of subjects is inappropriate when the purpose of the reform is to effect community change. But without an experi- mental design, how does one develop an appropriate counterfactual? How do we design an evaluation whose results can be generalized to other settings with different economic conditions, different complements of employment services, and different ground rules governing welfare participation? The evaluations of the welfare reform demonstrations can best be thought of as laboratory studies of changes in a particular set of policies, being tested in particular economic, social, and political contexts. As such, they can be enor- mously valuable to the states sponsoring them as well as to states that share similar social and economic contexts. Moreover, they contribute to the general knowledge base by providing additional data regarding behavioral responses to particular "bundles" of policy changes. States should be encouraged to continue their evaluation efforts, particularly if they have strong experimental designs in place to capture important aspects of their reforms. At the same time, it is important to capitalize on the great social experiment that is about to unfold as authority and responsibility for welfare policy devolve to the states. States may want to be "free riders," letting others do the empirical work upon which they can build future policy choices. But they must realize that they will bear the full fiscal risk of bad policy decisions and reap the benefits of wise ones, thus raising the stakes associated with formulating policy on the basis of either no research or flawed research.

166 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE AFOUL EVALUATING THE GREAT SOCIAL EXPERIMENT The next generation of welfare reforms could well have its largest effects by changing social norms particularly by increasing the social stigma attached to childbearing out of wedlock and to childbearing among those unable to support their children or already dependent on welfare. From the parochial perspective of the states implementing the reforms, there is little reason to look beyond whether welfare rolls decline and fewer children are being reared out of wedlock. A broader social view, however, argues for adopting a more comprehensive and longer-range research and evaluation plan involving multiple goals and assess- ment strategies. Ideally, the next wave of research on welfare reform will support the ability of states to simulate the likely response of target populations to various model welfare policies. In that ideal world, New Hampshire, as an example, would be able to simulate the change in caseloads and in the economic welfare of its low- income population that might be expected from continuing current policies, and to contrast these outcomes with what might happen if the state were to adopt policies more like those in Massachusetts or in Maine. And it would be able to conduct its simulations under alternative assumptions about the direction of its economy and demographic trends. Such simulations will result in a better under- standing than we now have of why the expected results will occur. At the same time, the next wave of research needs to look inside the "black box" of change much more carefully than have past studies. The reforms that are about to occur under PRWORA are simply too major in scope to assume there will be only marginal implications for family and child well-being. Meeting this objective suggests that the future research agenda related to welfare policy should address multiple, overlapping goals: (1) meet local program, policy monitoring, and assessment needs; (2) enhance basic knowledge of behavioral responses to various policies; (3) promote our understanding of contextual influences on hu- man behavior; and (4) strengthen our understanding of program and policy out- comes. The first of these goals is best addressed through research such as that of the waiver demonstration evaluation projects. These projects can inform the remaining goals, but they fall far short of providing generalizable findings. For these, we need both to capitalize on the ongoing national experiment we are witnessing and to conduct some carefully planned subexperiments within this natural experiment. State governors and legislatures, as well as local service deliverers, will need local monitoring and assessment strategies to address their own requirements for accountability and feedback. In order to meet these requirements, states should gather and analyze their program outcome measures on a regular basis, making certain those data are accurate and not subject to the types of reporting errors or delays that have plagued many of the waiver demonstration evaluations, such as the early assessments of New Jersey's family cap policy. States should pay close

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 167 attention to defining the relevant population. For example, they should consider whether they need to track the rate and characteristics of case openings and closings as well as monitor the activities of the ongoing caseload. Additionally, monitoring efforts should factor in demographic and contex- tual shifts. Economic change is demonstrably linked to welfare caseloads; changes in local labor market conditions can alter the likelihood that resident fathers will increase their hours of work and/or even find employment that will move them off welfare. Such conditions should be included in any monitoring of the consequences of suspending the 100-hour rule. Likewise, significant changes in the availability of family planning services are known to affect both fertility and pregnancy resolutions among low-income women, and these factors, not welfare policy changes, could drive apparent shifts in fertility outcomes among the welfare population. Predicting Behavioral Responses to Welfare Policies In the context of the broader mission of supporting extensive simulation results by states, research needs to focus more on the behavioral responses of individuals to specific welfare parameters. We need to know the expected change in the out-of-wedlock birth rate associated with particular income changes and needs resulting from an increase in family size. It also is important to know how marriage rates change as we vary the probability that individuals will be eligible for welfare and, conditional on their being eligible, vary their expected benefits. In both of these examples, we need to take into account the initial characteristics of the individual and other contextual factors. The change in the out-of-wedlock birth rate associated with various benefit increments likely will differ by the number of children one has already, the baseline benefit level (including whether the person is on welfare at all), and other social circum- stances. The particulars of the policy parameters that states have already changed or will modify under TANF are less important in themselves than are the conse- quences of these changes in terms of welfare eligibility and expected benefit levels for current and prospective welfare recipients. In general, the decisions of current and prospective recipients regarding future employment, family forma- tion, child support, and childbearing are going to be determined less by the policies and policy language than by what actually happens to their family's welfare eligibility status and benefit levels if they make particular choices such as the choice to have another child, to marry the father of their child, to get a job, to cooperate with child support, or to get divorced. Still, the specific formulation of certain policies itself may send important messages to the public regarding expectations and values, which could affect behavior. A prime example in which the message may be as powerful, or more powerful, than the financial consequences of the policy is the family cap. Family

168 CHANGING FAMILY FORMATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH WELFARE REFORM caps send a very clear message that taxpayers look down upon out-of-wedlock childbearing, especially if parents are unable to support their children. The wave of welfare reforms offers an unparalleled opportunity to learn about behavioral responses to income incentives, economic uncertainty, and so- cial support opportunities. We also can estimate the independent effect, if any, of the manner in which the economic consequences and support opportunities are packaged. For example, imagine that we collect and analyze longitudinal data on decisions that poor or near-poor people make and their consequences in terms of program eligibility and benefits for each welfare jurisdiction and for each year from 1992, when the flurry of welfare reform activity began, through the next 5 years. We could gather such information from a micro-level review of welfare applications and case records.~3 That is, we could sample records from the welfare files for all those years in all 50 states and in some counties and construct a database that includes, for each case: (1) basic information, such as number of children, age of youngest child, marital status, employment status, time on welfare, child support status, area of residence, age, and race/ethnicity; (2) status changes, if any, reflecting major behavioral decisions (for example, the birth of another child, a marriage or di- vorce, the acquisition or loss of a job, and increasing or decreasing hours of employment); and (3) for those with a status change, the impact of this on their welfare eligibility and benefit levels. The resulting database will allow us to create measures of the expected welfare response a person in situation "X" might face if he or she makes particular decisions regarding family formation and status. Once we have the hypothetical consequences for welfare eligibility and ben- efits of various behavioral choices that people make, we can use these data in statistical models designed to measure the strength of the behavioral response by current and prospective welfare recipients to particular welfare policy environ- ments. For example, we can estimate the impact of a particular benefit change (such as the introduction of a family cap) on fertility decisions of individuals with particular baseline characteristics and facing a particular policy context prior to the change. In essence, however, we would translate the family cap into particu- lar eligibility and benefit changes associated with fertility decisions that would result in the particular site and for particular individuals. Similarly, we could estimate the impact of a particular marriage penalty or reward on the likelihood of marriage, given the prevailing baseline context. Alternatively, we could simply gather welfare rules governing eligibility and benefit changes for individuals in various statuses and create rules-driven predictors of the policy response to behavioral choices facing individuals. Or we could survey a representative sample of low-income families and gather data on their reports of system responses to their behavioral changes. This has the problems of introducing recall and reporting bias and of being relatively costly.

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 169 Assuming we have sufficient variation from our natural experimental data- base, we should be able to generalize the results of particular policy shifts to other settings.l4 We could also incorporate into these behavioral models mea- sures of possible "message" effects (for example, the effects of a family cap policy beyond its effect on the marginal benefit level associated with a decision to have another child). Doing this would require gathering data for analysis on the understanding and beliefs of poor and near-poor families as well as service deliverers. Contextual and Ethnographic Analysis Now more than ever, it is critical that trained social scientists conduct sys- tematic, in-depth evaluations to further our understanding of the economic and social welfare of highly at-risk families; of the behavioral choices these families face and the decisions they make; and of the family, community, and social services they draw on to meet the challenges faced by those living near or in poverty. The most optimistic world under welfare Revolution is likely to be one in which state and local welfare reforms succeed in trimming the welfare rolls by providing greater incentives for those with the greatest social capital and familial support to eschew welfare. It also will undoubtedly fail to meet the income security needs of a portion of the current and prospective recipient pool who simply enter parenthood and/or adulthood without the social capital to escape poverty through their own labor or that of their partners. Even with strong employment support interventions, some poor families will hit the time limits and will risk taking their families to homeless shelters or the streets. The unfolding social experiment in welfare policy will enable us to identify and learn from these two very important subgroups of the poverty population. If we plan carefully, we can estimate the number and characteristics of those falling into each category. But, more important, we also could learn an enormous amount about the factors that contribute to family resilience under a "tougher" world vis a vis social welfare policy, and why some families need much more than offered by either the past welfare system or that which emerges under TANF. The results of such in-depth studies could provide the foundation for designing preventive and ameliorative policies directed at this the most needy group and at moving other families more quickly through transition dependency. One subset of such research could build on more routine longitudinal surveys of near-poor and poor families to track their movements on and off welfare; in and out of the labor market; through family formations and dissolutions; and 14The analytic models would operate rather like Mathematica Policy Research's STEWARD (Simulation of Trends in Employment, Welfare, and Related Dynamics) microsimulation model (Beebout et al., 1995).

170 CHANGING F~YFO~TIONBE~VIOR THROUGH WELFARE ~FO~ through fertility decisions. Researchers could then carefully select families fit- ting various profiles of special interest for example, seemingly low-resource families who succeed under various welfare support settings, their counterparts who "fail," and high-resource families who fail under various welfare support options and conduct an in-depth study of a sample of such families over a period of time to reconstruct the factors that contributed to varying degrees and in varying combinations to the successes or failures of the families. Another subset of this strand of research would entail intensive ethnographic research with at-risk families.l5 The focus of these studies will be on understand- ing the interactions among a broad set of contextual factors in determining behav- ioral choices of families and their short- and long-run implications. Such re- search would, for example, contribute to our understanding of the issues that poor and near-poor families consider in deciding whether to subsist on a low-wage job rather than apply for welfare or whether to place their child in poor-quality care in order to avoid welfare time limits. This research could then also follow the families to inform us of how the various decisions these families make play out for themselves and their children. Targeted Experimental Evaluations Some areas of reform are so different from past policy and practice that prudence argues for conducting targeted experimental evaluations as part of a phased implementation plan. Despite their limitations in terms of generalizability of findings and their inability to address systemic reform, we should not abandon experimental evaluations. They are unquestionably the best means of judging the efficacy of targeted interventions, particularly in cases where there is not yet sufficient evidence to support universal implementation of the policy. The strategies for conducting these types of evaluations are well documented, and there are dozens of models to draw on (Bell et al., 1995; Gordon et al., 1997; Boruch, 1997~. These types of evaluations are especially valuable in cases where policy makers are interested in comparing the status quo with proposed new policies or interventions designed to achieve specific improvements in outcomes. The researchers then design an efficient experimental evaluation with the pri- mary goal of testing the hypothesis that the new policy or intervention does have the intended consequences. To the extent feasible, such studies should also be accompanied by qualitative evaluations of the intervention or policy change and in-depth studies of purposefully selected subsets of the demonstration partici- pants for the purpose of understanding the contents of the so-called black box and, further, of helping to understand and interpret the impact analysis findings 15We are only recently beginning to constructively integrate the results of such analyses with the statistical research to identify behavioral models and to assess the efficacy of particular program models (e.g., see Polit, 1992; Quint et al., 1994a, 1994b; Luker, 1996; and Herr et al., 1996).

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 171 and translate them into more general conclusions for the benefit of the broader research and policy community. CONCLUSION State and local governments are being called upon to handle some of society's most vexing and intractable social problems. The empirical evidence available to support prudent policy making at the subfederal level is not as extensive as one might expect, given the amount of recent demonstration and evaluation activity. The basic research needed to guide future policy improvement entails ag- gressive study of the innovation and experimentation associated with PRWORA. We should be proactive in addressing evaluation issues and challenges. Surpns- ingly little was learned about how past welfare reforms have affected those be- haviors considered most important to the current reforms. We must learn from that history and do a better job of exploiting the knowledge development oppor- tunities arising from the devolution of responsibility for welfare from the federal government to the states and even to local governments. Whatever social and economic challenges PRWORA creates, it also opens up an enormous opportu- nity to study behavioral responses to quite major shifts in the incentives created by venous types of welfare policies. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors are most appreciative of comments provided by Isabel V. Sawhill on the conference version of the paper and of comments provided by Robert Moffitt and two anonymous referees on an interim draft. REFERENCES Beebout, H., R. Cohen, J. Czajka, J. DiCarlo, M. Dynarski, J. Jacobson, and R. Moffitt 1995 Simulation of Trends in Employment, Welfare, and Related Dynamics (STEWARD). Report submitted to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Mathematica Policy Re- search, Inc. Bell, S., L. Orr, J. Blomquist, and G. Cain 1995 Program Applicants as a Comparison Group in Evaluating Training Programs: Theory and a Test. Kalamazoo, Mich.: The Upjohn Institute. Birnbaum, M., and M. Wiseman 1996 Extending assistance to intact families: State experiments with the 100 hour rule. FOCUS 18(1, Special Issue):38-41. Bloom, D., V. Fellerath, D. Long, and R. Wood 1993 LEAP: Interim Findings on a Welfare Initiative to Improve School Attendance Among Teenage Parents. New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, May. Bloom, H., L. Orr, G. Cave, S. Bell, F. Doolittle, and W. Lin 1994 The National JTPA Study: Overview of the Impacts, Benefits, and Cost of Title IIA. Bethesda, Md.: Abt Associates, January.

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174 CHANGING FAMILY FORMATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH WELFARE REFORM Maynard, R., W. Nicholson, and A. Rangarajan 1993 Breaking the Cycle of Poverty: The Effectiveness of Mandatory Services for Welfare- Dependent Teenage Parents. Princeton, N.J.: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., Decem- ber. McLanahan, S., and G. Sandefur 1994 Growing Up with a Single Parent. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Meter, K.J., and D.R. McFarlane 1994 State family planning and abortion expenditures: Their effect on public health. American Journal of Public Health 84:1468-1472. Moffitt, R. 1992 Incentive effects of the U.S. welfare system: A review. Journal of Economic Literature 30: 1-61. The effect of the welfare system on nonmarital childbearing. In Report to Congress on Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Moore, K., C. Blumenthal, B. Sugland, B. Hyatt, N. Snyder, and D. Morrison 1994 State Variation in Rates of Adolescent Pregnancy and Childbearing. Washington, D.C.: Child Trends, Inc. Myers, R. 1995 New Jersey's 'family cap.' In Addressing Legitimacy: Welfare Reform Options for Con- gress. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, September. New Jersey Department of Human Services, Office of Public Affairs 1995 News release, May 16. Olds, D., C. Henderson, Jr., and R. Tatelbaum 1988 Improving the life-course development of socially disadvantaged mothers: A randomized trial of nurse home visitation. American Journal of Public Health 78(11):1436-1145. Olsen, J., and S. Weed 1986 Effects of family-planning programs for teenagers on adolescent birth and pregnancy rates. Family Planning Perspectives 20:153-170. O'Neill, J. 1994 Expert testimony in C.K. vs. Shalala, USDC, D. NJ, Civil Action No. 93-5354. O'Sullivan, A., and B. Jacobsen 1992 A randomized trial of a health care program for first-time adolescent mothers and their infants. Nursing Research 41(4):210-215. Plotnick, R. 1990 Welfare and out-of-wedlock childbearing: Evidence from the 1980s. Journal of Marriage and the Family 52:735-746. Plotnick, R., and S. Lundberg 1995 Adolescent and premarital childbearing: Do economic incentives matter? Journal of Labor Economics 13:177-200. Polit, D. 1992 Barriers to Self-Sufficiency and Avenues to Success Among Teenage Mothers. Princeton, N.J.: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Quint, J., D. Polit, H. Bos, and G. Cave 1994a New Chance: Interim Findings on a Comprehensive Program for Disadvantaged Young Mothers and Their Children. New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corpora- tion, September. Quint, J., J. Musick, and J. Ladner 1994b Lives of Promise, Lives of Pain: Young Mothers After New Chance. New York: Man- power Demonstration Research Corporation, January.

REBECCA MAYNARD ET AL. 175 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families Various Terms and conditions of waiver provisions for [state]. years U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 1995 Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the U.S. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1997 Setting the Baseline: A Report on State Welfare Waivers. June. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. Http://aspe.os.dhhs.gov/hsp/isp /waiver2. U.S. General Accounting Office 1992 Unemployed Parents: An Evaluation of the Effects of Welfare Benefits on Family Stabil- ity. GAO/PRMD-92-19BR. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means 1993 1993 Green Book: Background Material and Data on Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means. WMCP-103-18. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern ment Printing Office. 1996a 1996 Green Book: Background Material and Data on Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1996b Personal responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996: Conference Report to accompany H.R. 3734. Section 401, Purpose (p. 9), July 30.

176 CHANGING FAMILY FORMATION BEHAVIOR THROUGH WELFARE REFORM APPENDIX 6A Sources of Data on Impacts of Welfare-Related Demonstrations on Fertility Behavior of Teenage Parents Program Source(s) of Information on the Research Findings Job Start Cave, G., H. Bos, F. Doolittle, and C. Toussaint. October. "JOB START: Final report on a program for school dropouts." New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 1993. New Chance Quint, J., D. Polit, H. Bos, and G. Cave. "New Chance: Interim findings on a comprehensive program for disadvantaged young mothers and their children." New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, June 1994. Project Redirection Polit, D. and C. White. "The lives of young, disadvantaged mothers: the five year follow-up of the Project Redirection Sample." Saratoga Springs, NY: Humanalysis, Inc., May 1988. Ohio Learnfare Long, D., J. Gueron, R. Wood, R. Fisher, and V. Fellerath. "LEAP: Three-year impacts of Ohio's welfare initiative to improve school attendance among teenage parents." New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, 1996. Bloom, D., V. Fellerath, D. Long, and R. Wood. "LEAP: Interim findings on a welfare initiative to improve school attendance among teenage parents: Ohio's Learning, Earning, and Parenting Program." New York: Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, May 1993. Teen Parent Welfare Maynard, R. (ed.). "Building self-sufficiency among welfare Demonstration dependent teenage parents." Princeton, N.J.: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., June 1993. Maynard, R., W. Nicholson, and A. Rangarajan. "Breaking the cycle of poverty: The effectiveness of mandatory services for welfare dependent teenage parents." Princeton, N.J.: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., December 1993. Hershey, A., and M. Silverberg. "Program cost of the teenage parent demonstration." Princeton, N.J.: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., 1993. Maynard, R. and A. Rangarajan. "Contraceptive use and repeat pregnancies among welfare-dependent teenage mothers." Family Planning Perspectives Vol. 26(5): 198-205. Teen Parent Health O'Sullivan, A., and B. Jacobsen. "A randomized trial of a health care Care Program program for first-time adolescent mothers and their infants." Nursing Research Vol. 41(4):210-215. Elmira Nurse Home Olds, D., C.S. Henderson, R. Tatelbaum, and R. Chamberlin. Visiting Program "Improving the life-course development of socially disadvantaged mothers: A randomized trial of nurse home visitation." American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 78(11):1436-1445.

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The design of welfare programs in an era of reform and devolution to the states must take into account the likely effects of programs on demographic behavior. Most research on welfare in the past has examined labor market issues, although there have also been some important evaluations of the effects of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program on out-of-wedlock childbearing. Much less information is available on other issues equally central to the debate, including effects on abortion decisions, marriage and divorce, intrafamily relations, household formation, and living arrangements. This volume of papers contains reviews and syntheses of existing evidence bearing on the demographic impacts of welfare and ideas for how to evaluate new state-level reforms.

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