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Title: The Decline of Cash Assistance and the Well-Being of Poor Households with Children

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has declined sharply, and what remains often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change mirrors others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven in part by shifting cultural notions of which social groups constitute the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. This line was firmly redrawn in the 1990s. Did the re-institutionalization of these categorizations in policy have material consequences? In this study, we examine the relationship between the decline of traditional cash welfare during the 2001-2015 period and two direct measures of wellbeing among households with children: household food insecurity and public school child homelessness. Using models that control for state and year trends, along with other factors, we find that the decline of cash assistance is associated with increases in these two forms of hardship.

Url: https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/01/Shaefer-cashassistance-hardship.pdf

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Authors: Shaefer, H Luke; Edin, Kathryn; Fusaro, Vincent; Wu, Pinghui

Series Title: Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan Working Paper Series

Publication Number: 8-18

Institution: University of Michigan

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Publisher Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan

Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Poverty and Welfare

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