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Welfare Reform And The Intergenerational Transmission Of Dependence, Robert Paul Hartley, Carlos Lamarche, James P. Ziliak

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

We estimate the effect of welfare reform on the intergenerational transmission of welfare participation using a long panel of mother-daughter pairs over the survey period 1968-2013 in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Because states implemented welfare reform at different times starting in 1992, the cross-state variation over time permits us to quasi-experimentally separate out the effect of mothers’ participation on daughters’ welfare choice in the pre- and post-welfare reform periods. Our empirical framework also addresses potential issues in identifying a causal pathway from parent to child that arise from correlated unobservables in welfare decisions, misclassification error in survey reports, …