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Title: Welfare and Immigrants Choice of Residency and Female Income Differentials with Means-tested or Universal Benefits: Two Essays

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2003

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Abstract: This thesis investigates the effect of social benefits on the labor market behavior of immigrants and females. The first part analyses the effect of welfare generosity on the choice of residency of immigrants and natives. The second part investigates the extent to which social benefits affect the relative well-being of females with and without children in the context of four countries. The effect of welfare benefits on migration has long been discussed, but the research has not led to unequivocal conclusions. Similarly, without the support of a consensus in the literature, patterns in the concentration of immigrants across the United States have been suspected of reflecting welfare generosity. The goal of the first study is to reduce uncertainty regarding the extent of welfare induced migratory and clustering behavior of foreign-born individuals. The choice of residence of immigrants in relation to natives is investigated by relating those choices to the interstate dispersion of welfare benefits and other economic variables and their changing magnitudes over time. The reliability of common methodological approaches is also examined. The paper employs difference-in-difference comparison group-based methods with state fixed effects along with mixed multinomial and conditional logits. The empirical analysis indicates that immigrants cluster in high benefit regions, but their migration pattern is positively correlated with changes over time of economic variables other than welfare benefits. These results have been confirmed by more recent data of immigrant migration patterns. The findings of this paper suggest the existence of other factors aside from benefits (for example, wage rates and ethnic networks), which explain the residential choice of immigrants to a greater extent.The second study explores cross-country variation in social benefits and their effect on the size of the family gap the gap in the well-being of women with and without children as measured by income components. The analysis finds a lot of variation in the impact of benefits across countries and within the income distribution. In countries with means-tested benefits the effect of children on disposable income is not alleviated, but reduced, while countries with universal benefits do not exhibit any effect of children at the bottom of the distribution.

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Authors: Sierminska, Eva M.

Institution: Johns Hopkins University

Department: Department of Economics

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Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Publisher Location: Baltimore, MD

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Fertility and Mortality, Migration and Immigration

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