For Immediate Release
Feb. 20, 2003
Contact: Arnstein Aassve, University of Leicester, 44 116 252 5343, aa128@leicester.ac.uk
Welfare Cuts Would Have Only Modest Impact on Unwed Births
Drastically reducing welfare benefits would lead to only a small decline in out-of-wedlock births, according to a study reported in the February issue of the journal Demography.
Findings suggest that a young woman's financial resources — her potential earnings, parents' income, and state welfare benefits — play a small but significant role in premarital childbearing and her decision to marry. But major changes in these economic resources — a 60 percent increase or decrease in welfare benefits or wages — do not necessarily translate into substantial changes in out-of-wedlock births, reports economist Arnstein Aassve of the University of Leicester, England.
The results are based on the childbearing and marriage histories of a representative sample of 3,700 young U.S. women tracked between 1979 and 1992. The women were ages 14 to 20 in 1979.
More than one-quarter of the women studied (28.6 percent) had an unwed birth. Aassve analyzed the impact of a variety of factors on the likelihood a woman would have one or more unwed births and whether and when she would marry. His analysis suggests that if welfare benefits were cut by 60 percent, then 6 percent fewer young women would have an unwed birth (bringing the total down to 22.8 percent). This change represents a decline of about 20 percent in the share of women with out-of-wedlock births. Similarly, a 60 percent increase in welfare benefits would lead to an additional 6 percent of women having a birth out of wedlock (increasing the total to 34.7 percent), representing a roughly 20 percent increase.
"Financial incentives are important," said Aassve. "But if the goal is to make sweeping changes in non-marital childbearing, cutting welfare benefits is unlikely to provide a sufficient policy tool."
He found that wage levels and parental income played more of a role than welfare benefits in a young unwed mother's decision to marry or have a second child outside marriage. Unwed mothers with high earnings are more likely to marry and considerably less likely to have a second unwed birth. Overall, he found that women with higher earnings and higher levels of education were less likely to marry early or have a nonmarital birth.
Policies that offer educational benefits and more economic opportunity for US women are likely to have the greatest impact on unwed childbearing, said Aassve.
Welfare reform in the 1990s changed the incentive structure in an attempt to make working more beneficial, he noted. "Cutting the current program would not have the same impact as cutting the old AFDC program, but I suspect the differences would not be dramatic," he said.
He also cautioned that the analysis considers marriage only and not cohabitation, which has become "more acceptable and is often seen as an alternative to marriage."
The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research provided support for revision of the article.