Recent studies of welfare recipients in the United States have found that most of them remain on welfare for only short periods of time. However, the evidence also shows that a small number of recipients are highly dependent on public support and have long welfare careers. These long term recipients are also responsible for the largest portion of welfare expenditures. Although much has been learned about this important phenomenon, a wide range of issues related to the process and patterns of welfare dependence remain to be investigated. This project proposes to study the patterns and determinants of welfare use and dependency in the Deep South, an area which has a higher concentration of poverty, larger numbers of poorly educated people, and a higher concentration of low wage employment than other parts of the country. Due to these factors, among others, the Deep South region provides particularly suitable conditions for testing hypotheses related to welfare dependency. One of these, on which attention is centered, is the so-called culture of poverty hypothesis. This states that high concentrations of poverty, existing over many years, may lead to the emergence of a welfare culture which translates into long term welfare use and to inter-generational transmission of welfare dependency. The study will investigate empirically individual, social, cultural, labor market, and institutional factors that lead to long term welfare use. The main thrust will be to specify lifetime models permitting the estimation of the duration of time on welfare. In addition, the study will focus on labor market models incorporating job search, unemployment durations, and wage determination as they relate to welfare use and dependency. Survey data of AFDC recipients from the state of Tennessee and from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) will be utilized. The investigator is asking very important policy-related questions, the answers to which promise to provide information crucial to welfare reform. The empirical work involved marks one of the first SIPP analyses of the problem of welfare dependence. The new evidence will enable valuable comparisons with earlier studies based on PSID and NLSY surveys.
