Family and neighborhood welfare dependency and sons' labor supply

This article tests four models of how parental and childhood welfare use affects sons' labor supply: the correlated disadvantages model, Wilson's structural-environmental model, Mead's welfare culture model, and Murray's incentives model. Past research is extended by including measures of all seven factors that these models predict will shape sons' labor supply: parental welfare use, neighborhood welfare use, parental income, family noneconomic resources, neighborhood resources, labor market conditions, and state welfare benefits. There are four main findings. First, welfare use in the childhood neighborhood has no effects on sons' work hours. Second, only one group of sons is affected by parental welfare use: black sons' whose parents average $7,500 or more in welfare income per year. Third, black sons' adult work hours are strongly predicted by parental poverty and by labor market conditions; together these account for half the estimated relationships between heavy parental welfare use and black sons' labor supply. Fourth, parents' and neighbors' work hours strongly predict nonblack sons' labor supply. This research was supported by Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services, by the Rockefeller Foundation, and by the Office of the Vice-President for Research at the University of Michigan. We are grateful to John Bound, Sheldon Danziger, Greg Duncan, Martha Hill, and an anoymous reviewer for helpful comments and advice, to Marguerite Grabarek and James Kunz for programming, and most of all to Wendy Niemi for her patient, accurate, and efficient typing. Her research interests include poverty, social stratification, and labor economics. His research interests include rural poverty, poverty neighborhoods, and intergenerational poverty.