Funded Research
Welfare Reform and Migration: Moving to Benefits, Moving from Restrictions?
Source: NIH/NICHD
Active: 02/01/03 - 01/31/07
Investigator(s):
Gordon F. De Jong
Deborah Graefe
Has devolution of welfare policy in the 1996 welfare reform legislation created new state benefits and rules inequalities that engender inter-and intra-state migration of welfare poor families? Does welfare-driven migration result in increased after-move well-being compared with before the move for welfare poor families versus non-migrant families? This study uses merged data from four sources the 1996 and 2001 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and a local labor market characteristics file created from decennial census and Current Population Survey data in a longitudinal, two-stage specification of welfare-benefit push and pull impacts on poor families' migration behavior. Based upon a state welfare policy inequality framework, we use factor analysis to develop measures from post-1996 textual policy manuals to operationalize 10 welfare benefit and eligibility rule dimensions and to test hypothesized state program effects on migration. We use discrete-time event history analysis to predict migration events (inter-state and intra-state migration) in the SIPP data. Our multi-level hierarchical modeling strategy is an integrated, and previously untested, micro-macro analysis of three determinant-of-migration hypotheses for welfare poor families. Go to project web site
