Are single mothers finding jobs without displacing other workers?

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 124, Issue 7, 2001, Pages 3-12

  Lerman, Robert I ^a   Ratcliffe, Caroline ^b  

^a AMERICAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0038603312     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. See, for example, Sheldon Danziger and Jeffrey Lehman, "How Will Welfare Recipients Fare in the Labor Market?" Challenge, March-April 1996, pp. 30-35; and Peter Edelman, "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done," Atlantic Monthly, March 1997, pp. 43-58.
2. See, for example, Sheldon Danziger and Jeffrey Lehman, "How Will Welfare Recipients Fare in the Labor Market?" Challenge, March-April 1996, pp. 30-35; and Peter Edelman, "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done," Atlantic Monthly, March 1997, pp. 43-58.
3. The single mothers most likely to participate in welfare programs are those who have never married (as opposed to divorced, separated, or widowed single mothers).
4. The numbers are from unpublished tabulations provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
5. Katherine Allen and Maria Kirby, Unfinished Business: Why Cities Matter to Welfare Reform (Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, 2000).
6. Robert Solow, Work and Welfare (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1998).
7. Timothy J. Bartik, "Displacement and Wage Effects of Welfare Reform," in David E. Card and Rebecca M. Blank, Finding Jobs: Work and Welfare Reform (New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2000), pp. 72-122.
8. Robert I. Lerman, Pamela Loprest, and Caroline Ratcliffe, How Well Can Urban Labor Markets Absorb Welfare Recipients? Assessing the New Federalism, no. A-33 (Washington, DC, Urban Institute, 1999).
9. Jared Bernstein, Welfare Reform and the Low-Wage Labor Market: Employment, Wages, and Wage Policies, Technical Paper 226 (Washington, DC, Economic Policy Institute, 1997).
10. The figure was tabulated with data from National Income and Product Accounts, Second Quarter 2000 GDP Revised Estimates (Bureau of Economic Affairs, 2000); on the Internet at http://www.bea.doc.gov/ bea/newsrel/gdp200a.htm.
11. Data are from Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, second quarter 1996 and second quarter 1999 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1996 and 1999); on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov.
12. Large samples of single mothers and other low-skilled groups are necessary to yield reliable estimates of employment and earnings. Even with 12 months of CPS data in each year and samples of 10,532 and 11,877 single mothers in the two study periods, respectively, the sample size was too small (fewer than 100 cases) to calculate employment levels for some subgroups in several of the 20 metropolitan areas. Because the CPS asks only one quarter of each month's sample about weekly wages, the sample size for weekly wage data on some subgroups was adequate only in the 5 largest metropolitan areas and all 20 metropolitan areas combined.
13. Laura Wheaton and Linda Giannarelli, "Underreporting of Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the March CPS," in 2000 Proceedings of the Section on Goverment Statistics and Section on Social Statistics (Washington, DC, American Statistical Association).
14. The sample size was too small for the calculation of reliable estimates in the San Jose metropolitan area.
15. The 10-percent increase in the single-mother workforce was lower than the 26-percent rise in the participation rate of single mothers because of a decline in the population of the group.
16. Lerman, Loprest, and Ratcliffe, Urban Labor Markets.
17. Authors' calculations from CPS, March 1990 and March 1999.
18. Pamela Loprest, How Families That Left Welfare Are Doing: A National Picture, Assessing the New Federalism, No. B-I (Washington, DC, Urban Institute, 1999).
19. Sandra Danziger, Mary Corcoran, Sheldon Danziger, Colleen Heflin, Ariel Kalil, Judith Levine, Daniel Rosen, Kristin Seefeldt, Kristine Siefert, and Richard Tolman, Barriers to the Employment of Welfare Recipients (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Poverty Research and Training Center, 2000); on the Internet at http://www.ssw.umich.edu/poverty/ wesappam.pdf.