JCPR Hosts Grants Conference
Census data used to investigate poverty issues

Winter 2004, Volume 26, Number 1

On September 4-5, Northwestern University’s and the University of Chicago’s Joint Center for Poverty Research (JCPR) hosted the 2002-03 U.S. Census Bureau/Health and Human Services – Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation Research Development Grants Conference in Washington, D.C.

The papers provided insights into a diverse range of topics such as the effects of student loan availability and how children’s disabilities affect their mothers’ ability to work.

According to Greg Duncan, who administers the Census grants program, “This program provides an important source of support to academics interested in conducting research on this data.” Duncan is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern and an IPR/JCPR fellow.

Does the availability of student loans affect who goes to college and where? In her paper “Loans, Liquidity, and Schooling Decisions,” Susan Dynarski, with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the National Bureau of Economic Research, examines the passage of the 1992 Higher Education Amendments (HEA92). HEA92 eliminated a provision counting a family’s home equity in federal aid eligibility. Between 1992-93 and 2000-01, loan volume doubled to $36 billion. Families whose homes had greater value saw larger increases in their aid eligibility. Yet the number of college students remained about the same, while the average size of a loan and the number of student loans grew sharply—with grants growing more slowly. “There has been a marked shift in the composition of aid from grants to loans over the past decade,” she wrote. Her results find a small indication that these “marginal eligible” youth, who now qualify for financial aid because of the change, were slightly more likely to go to college and attend four-year colleges. She also found that whether additional financial aid came as grants or loans, it had roughly the same effect on decisions to attend college.

Has welfare reform and the approaching end of benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families’ (TANF)-imposed time-limits put pressure on women to leave welfare for jobs that are less than desirable to support their families? The paper “Did Welfare Leavers’ Employment Levels and Job Characteristics Change During TANF Implementation?: An Analysis Using SIPP 1996-2000” explores this question. Claudia Coulton, one of the paper’s co-authors, presented evidence that of the sample who found jobs when they left welfare (70.6 percent), slightly less than 25 percent found “good” jobs—defined as those paying at least $7.50 an hour for at least 35 hours per week. Overall, their study found women’s chances of employment “fell gradually and then recovered slightly as welfare-reform implementation progressed, even as the economy was growing.” Finding a good job remains a difficult task for these women. Neither TANF nor a strong economy seemed to boost—or decrease—their chances of finding such a job. They did find, however, women who live in states with shorter time limits than the federal limits were half as likely to find a good job. Their study confirmed a strong economy does help raise employment levels, but not job quality. Coulton, Younghee Lim, Nina Lalich, and Thomas B. Cook, all of Case Western Reserve University, authored the paper.

How does having a child with a disability affect his or her mother’s employment? This question is examined in “The Impact of Disabilities on Mothers’ Work Participation: Examining Differences Between Single and Married Mothers” by Sunhwa Lee, Gi-Taik Oh, Heidi Hartmann, and Barbara Gault of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Looking at family composition and marital status, the authors conclude that mothers and children with disabilities are more prevalent in low-income populations, and more common in single-mother families. They found 25 percent of welfare mothers have a severe disability, and thus shoulder a severe economic burden due to current welfare time limits and mandatory work participation. For mothers of children with disabilities, the age of their disabled children, the ages of their other children, and their marital status can also affect their ability to cope with employment to varying degrees. Whatever the mother’s status, the authors underscore one factor that matters to all welfare-to-work mothers: “Without appropriate provisions for child care that can accommodate not only healthy children but also disabled children with special care needs, it may not be possible for many mothers to seek and maintain employment.”

“Does time on welfare affect women’s wages?” Mary Noonan of the University of Iowa and Colleen Heflin of the University of Kentucky investigated this question. Their paper showed that women might be penalized in the short run for their time out of the work force. But in the long run welfare-to-work legislation might actually have beneficial economic effects and increase future earnings by helping women with negligible workforce skills and low levels of education to secure better jobs eventually. Though they do find evidence that work breaks can result in a wage “penalty” during the first six months following the break, this penalty is quickly erased. “All in all these results imply that more time on welfare—especially when combined with employment—does not in and of itself harm women’s future earnings,” they concluded. This leads them to find merit in approaches encouraging welfare mothers to work while on welfare, but “little for time limits since the length of a welfare spell does not have an additional negative impact on earnings,” they said.

For copies of these and other papers presented at the conference, please go to www.jcpr.org/conferences/oldconferences/grantsconf_2003_papers.html.