Rural/Urban Welfare Program and Labor Force Participation

doi:10.1111/1467-8276.00497

If you are seeing this message, you may be experiencing temporary network problems. Please wait a few minutes and refresh the page. If the problem persists, you may wish to report it to your local Network Manager.

It is also possible that your web browser is not configured or not able to display style sheets. In this case, although the visual presentation will be degraded, the site should continue to be functional. We recommend using the latest version of Microsoft or Mozilla web browser to help minimise these problems.

Wiley InterScience

American Journal of Agricultural Economics

Volume 85 Issue 4, Pages 914 - 927

Published Online: 14 Oct 2003

Save Article to My Profile Download Citation Request Permissions

Abstract | References | Full Text: HTML, PDF (Size: 181K) | Related Articles | Citation Tracking

Rural/Urban Welfare Program and Labor Force Participation

Maureen Kilkenny and Sonya Kostova Huffman

Maureen Kilkenny is associate professor and Sonya Kostova Huffman is postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at Iowa State University.

This research has been supported by a cooperative agreement from the USDA Economic Research Service, Hatch Act, and State of Iowa funds. The authors thank David Figlio, Peter Orazem, Stan Johnson, Wally Huffman, Mark Partridge, Euan Phimister, Steve Vogel, Helen Jensen, the anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Iowa State University and Aberdeen University. Journal Paper No. J-19746 of the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station, Ames, Iowa.

KEYWORDS

labor force • Oaxaca • rural • TANF program • welfare reform

ABSTRACT

Nonmetro poor in the Midwest participate more in the labor force and less in welfare programs than metro poor. We formalize how household composition, capital, labor market conditions, and state-specific regulations define opportunity sets, then estimate a bivariate binomial probit model of work and program participation choices. An Oaxaca decomposition analysis is conducted to compare differences in characteristics to differences in behavior in explaining the two groups' choices. We find no behavioral basis for the difference in labor market participation. And while most of the lower Midwestern nonmetro welfare program participation is due to demographics, some is due to different life-cycle behavior.

[Received October 2001; accepted January 2003.]

DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER (DOI)

10.1111/1467-8276.00497 About DOI