Welfare Reform, Family Structure, and Migration: Moving to Benefits: Moving from Restrictions

Gordon F. De Jong, Pennsylvania State University
Deborah Graefe, Pennsylvania State University
Tanja St. Pierre, Pennsylvania State University

The thesis of this study is that with increased state welfare benefit and eligibility inequalities, the 1996 welfare reform act has not only enhanced incentives for poor families to move, but also created disincentives to stay in "race to the bottom" origin states. We posit that family structure moderates the effect of state welfare policy inequalities on migration behavior. We use merged data from three different sources: the 1996-1999 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the Urban institute's Welfare Rules Database, and state economic characteristics from Current Population Surveys. We separately model destination (pull) and departure (push) effects of welfare policy measures and selected covariates in a multi-level, discrete-time event-history migration model. Preliminary evidence provides general support for the thesis that changes in state welfare policy have precipitated the interstate migration of poor families in the U.S.