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Title: Employment Instability and Child Wellbeing in the United States: Mitigating Effects of the Safety Net

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2021

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Abstract: This dissertation includes three studies that examine intra-year employment and work hours instability as it relates to children’s economic wellbeing and risk of child maltreatment, with particular attention to the responsiveness of government programs to precarious parental work. In the first paper, I use data from the monthly Current Population Survey to provide the first demographic analysis of month-to-month parental work-hours volatility. I find that higher instability in work hours overall is concentrated in the top and bottom tails of the wage distribution, with parents at the bottom end of the wage distribution experiencing the most volatile hours worked. Young parents and parents who did not graduate high school were consistently estimated to have more variability in their hours worked than older and more highly educated parents. Consistent patterns of racial disparities in work-hours instability did not emerge among the whole sample, but among unmarried parents, Black parents experienced greater work-hours instability than their white counterparts. In my second paper, I use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to investigate how intra-year caregiver work hours volatility is related to child poverty, measured through both the official and supplemental poverty measures. I further examine varying degrees of buffering effects of government programs on income declines resulting from work-hours volatility. The results suggest that greater work-hours volatility is related to a higher risk of childhood poverty. In-kind benefits are more effective in buffering household income declines resulting from unstable caregiver work hours. This is followed by tax systems and cash programs. I find that the effectiveness of the near-cash programs is particularly protective for the children of unpartnered single mothers and Black children. Hispanic children also benefit from the transfers’ compensating effects on instability in work hours and, thereby, earnings, but to a lesser degree. The third paper draws on administrative data from a sample of families at-risk for child protective services (CPS) involvement in Wisconsin to investigate the link between earnings instability and CPS involvement. Specifically, it examines whether adequate access to safety-net programs mitigates the likelihood of child welfare involvement when families encounter negative earnings shocks. I find evidence of a link between negative earnings shocks (losses of earnings) and a family’s subsequent CPS involvement. Findings suggest that unfavorable earnings instability is linked to greater CPS-involvement risk, particularly for child abuse (compared to child neglect). In addition, I find that accessing sufficient social benefits as supplemental income when negative earnings shocks occur serves to effectively buffer against the risk of child maltreatment, particularly among families with young children (ages 0–4).

Url: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2572612058?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true

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Authors: Cai, Julie Yixia

Institution: University of Wisconsin-Madison

Department: Social Welfare

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Publisher Location: Madison

Pages: 1-157

Data Collections: IPUMS USA, IPUMS CPS

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Work, Family, and Time

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