Seminario "Holding out for Mr Right: Women’s Income, Marital Status and Child Well-Being"
Miércoles 25 de abril, 17h
Presentado por Anna Aizer
Abstract
The objective of welfare is to improve child well-being, but it can also create disincentives for
mothers to marry, potentially negatively affecting children in the long run. Using administrative
data for more than 10,000 women from the Mother’s Pension Program, the first welfare program
in the US, we find that welfare receipt does result in delayed marriage, but does not affect lifetime
remarriage rates. Importantly when women on welfare do marry, they marry men of higher
socio-economic status and health. This is consistent with a model of search in the marriage
market in which welfare receipt allows women to search for longer in order to match with more
desirable men, thereby improving children’s long run outcomes. These results also highlight
the importance of paternal inputs into children’s development.
Anna Aizer
Anna Aizer
Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Brown University. Ph.D. in Economics, UCLA.
Anna Aizer came to Brown and the PSTC in 2003 after a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University's Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. She is a labor and health economist with interests in the area of child health and well-being.
Her research has been featured in Science (“The Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality: Maternal Disadvantage and Health at Birth”), American Economic Review (“The Long Term Impact of Cash Transfers to Poor Families”), and Quarterly Journal of Economics (“Juvenile Incarceration, Human Capital and Future Crime: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges”).