Off to the (Labor) Market: Women, Work, and Welfare Reform in 21st Century American Cities

Author: Timothy J. Haney

Dissertation School: University of Oregon

Abstract:

This research will contribute to scholarly understanding of the labor market activity of women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods in large U.S. cities, the group most affected by 1996’s welfare reform legislation. It will uncover the extent to which this subset of women has found steady employment in standard, living wage-jobs as well as the reasons why many have not. But, unlike most work in this field, it incorporates measures of neighborhood disadvantage to further explore the spatial barriers to employment faced by this demographic group.

To examine this topic, I will utilize survey data from the Project on Devolution and Urban Change, a longitudinal study of 3,916 women living in poor neighborhoods in Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, and Philadelphia. The MDRC, formerly the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, collected two waves of data, the first in 1998-1999 and the second in 2001. To date, most welfare “leaver” studies rely on cross-sectional data and therefore cannot fully weigh the factors responsible for transitions into and out of employment, making the Urban Change study’s longitudinal design ideal for such questions. Furthermore, I link these individual data to census data at the tract-level, resulting in a longitudinal, multi-city, geographically linked dataset, something that no previous published research uses, but an important tool for understanding how neighborhood context affects individual outcomes.

Consistent with HUD’s objectives of strengthening cities by creating jobs for low-income persons, enhancing the sustainability of communities by expanding economic opportunity, and making communities more livable, this research will help to uncover whether living in an impoverished urban environment exacerbates the employment problems of women already facing several daunting barriers to employment. In other words, does neighborhood context still matter for employment once individual barriers are controlled? This question implies very crucial policy alternatives: should public dollars be allocated to providing childcare subsidies, education and otherwise alleviating individual barriers to employment or alternatively, might funds be better spent de-concentrating poor neighborhoods and providing more stable housing options?

I will answer these questions using a combination of regression-based statistical approaches (including OLS, logistic, ordered logistic, multinomial logistic, robust standard error corrections, and where necessary, Hierarchical Linear Modeling). In order to properly measure the effect of changes over time (for example, the effect of declining health on employment), I will calculate change scores and utilize a lagged endogenous variable approach, well-suited for longitudinal data.

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