This dissertation presents the results of three studies examining the determinants and consequences of employment among single mothers with infants and toddlers. In the first study, I use nationally-representative survey data to identify the effect of age-of-youngest-child welfare-to-work exemptions on the employment of single mothers with no more than a high school degree. These exemption policies, which vary by state and calendar year, determine when welfare recipients must comply with program work requirements after having a child. I estimate that eligibility for an exemption decreases the probability of working, suggesting that the shortening in recent years of these state-level welfare exemptions has hastened, on average, single mothers' employment after a pregnancy. The second study combines quantitative and qualitative data to explore the context of maternal work decisions following the birth of a child in cohabiting (unmarried) families. To systematically generate and test hypotheses that capture the complexity of return-to-work decisions, I use an inventive combination of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), narrative analysis of qualitative data, and conventional statistical analyses. These analyses indicate that mothers' employment prior to the birth is positively associated with employment within the first year after the birth. Also, for these unmarried couples, the influence of father's employment or income on maternal work decisions is less uniformly negative than theory would predict. This chapter also highlights the promise and challenges of using "mixed methods" to examine complex social phenomena. The final study estimates the effects of maternal employment on young children's cognitive and socioemotional development using data from five randomized experiments of welfare reform programs. In the estimation model, maternal employment is instrumented by random assignment to the treatment group, an exogenous predictor of maternal employment. While OLS estimates indicate that both level and stability of employment are positively related to children's socioemotional development, decreasing problem behavior, this result does not hold in instrumental-variable (IV) models. IV models do estimate large positive effects of both level and stability of employment on school achievement, but these effects decrease in size and lose significance in models controlling for income and welfare receipt.

Last modified

• 08/27/2018

Creator

• Heather D Hill

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2MH89

Subject

• Social Policy to Education and Social Policy - Human Development and Social Policy

Keyword

• quantitative methods
• mixed methods
• maternal employment
• infants and toddlers,
• welfare policy

Date created

• 2007-07-25

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright