Employment, migration, and living arrangements: Three essays on welfare reform

This dissertation contains three essays evaluating aspects of U.S. social welfare programs. Social welfare's design was changed during the 1990s, due to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 that created the program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.;The first essay, "Welfare Cohabitation Penalties and Parental Support for Single Mothers," analyzes welfare benefit reductions that target single mothers who receive in-kind housing from their parents. Estimates from a semi-parametric model of the joint choices of employment and living arrangements suggest these welfare program incentives reduce the likelihood single mothers live in their parent's home and work.;The second essay, "What if Welfare Had No Work Requirements," compares the employment behavior of single mothers exempt from welfare program work requirements, to that of single mothers subject to the requirements. The exemption is based on the age of a mother's youngest child. Because the two groups' behavior is so similar, the analysis implies work requirements played only a small role, if any, in the large employment increases among single mothers since 1993.;The third essay, "Are Family Caps Affecting Fertility or Mobility? A Test for Welfare Magnets," tests for the influence of benefit changes on the migration of welfare recipients. Because of how the family cap policies limit benefit increases following child birth, the analysis can isolate a narrow group of recipients whose gain to moving is substantially greater than the remaining recipients. The analysis notes that these cases are more than twice as likely to have an interstate move than comparison groups of similar women, or the national average.;Each of the three essays evaluates an aspect of welfare program incentives not analyzed previously in the context of welfare reform. The reforms changed the nation's social programs in many ways, in particular increasing program heterogeneity among the states. The results of this research add to the body of work trying to understand the complicated ways in which social programs affect individual behavior.