Thread by @agoodmanbacon

Excited to share my paper with @DrJPCunningham on welfare participation and family structure in the 1960s (topics that arouse virtually no controversy whatsoever…)

We document an important role for the War on Poverty's Legal Services Program (LSP):

nber.org/papers/w26238

Family structure was pretty stable from at least 1880-1960. About 10% of mothers were unmarried, usually b/c they were widows.

Then an enormous change. Maybe the biggest demographic phenomenon of the 20th century aside from the baby boom. Single parenthood has almost quadrupled.

Why? Well, lots of ideas have been thrown around: contraception? marriageable men? feminism? welfare?

But evidence about the 1960s is often unreliable or descriptive, and causal evidence often focuses on other periods.

That’s where LSP comes in.

Legal Aid in the US dates to the 1870s, but was small. In 1964, Ford Foundation attorneys Edgar and Jean Camper Cahn argued that neighborhood law firms could facilitate poverty programs’ “Civilian perspective”. OEO brought them and made LSP a national emphasis program.

LSPs massively increased the quantity of legal aid (stats from testimony by a young up-and-comer named Don Rumsfeld), *and* changed its character. Outreach, activism, test cases. They wanted to effect change.

OEO folks were bullish (and Spiro Agnew was mad).

NB, @DrJPCunningham is the real LSP expert. See his work on

riots: jameinpcunningham.com/uploads/1/1/2/…

riots w/ @robgillezeau: rsfjournal.org/content/4/6/144

and

police/community relations: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

What did LSPs do?

1. Divorces. Prior Legal Aid generally didn’t.
2. A ton of welfare advocacy (wrote “welfare manuals”, sued departments, worked w/ Welfare Rights Organizations, encouraged client appeals (see appendix 1! nber.org/data-appendix/…)

Most advocacy focused on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC; cash welfare for single parents). Virtually *any* economic model implies that paying $ only to single parents increases single parenthood. Ethnographies often show the same thing.

Until now we just haven’t had data to study this. @martha_j_bailey, @DrJPCunningham, and I typed in a bunch of new county/year outcomes from about 1960-1988:

Divorces and Marriages
AFDC Cases
Nonmarital Births

This has been a long time in the making!

We use a roll out DD design. There’s not much timing (😞) so we do 2 things to get a good “control group”:

1. inverse p-score reweighting
2. state/year FE + urban/year FE

“love plots” (which are awesome) show both achieve good balance, and they give the same answer throughout!

The basic story from our event-studies is no trend in outcomes until LSPs start, but then:

1. Short-run ⬆️ in divorce (ie. pent up demand!).

2. Longer-run ⬆️ in AFDC.

3. Longer-run ⬆️ in non marital births.

1 and 2 were *intended*. 3 was not.

How do non marital births change? *Not* because women have babies to get AFDC. They forego a shotgun marriage instead.

This is exactly what we see nationally: premarital conceptions are flat, pre-birth marriages fall: demographic-research.org/volumes/vol27/…

We see this in the 1960/1970 Census, too:
P(unmarried head) ⬆️
P(live w/ father of kids) ⬇️

Effects bigger for moms with less education.

Poverty does *not* increase. Father’s income is gone, but hh size falls, too and moms get AFDC.

We try to rule out other (plausible!) stories. It’s not other WoP $, riots, white flight, or no-fault divorce. Same when comparing earlier to later LSPs.

We get beautiful ZEROES when we use community health centers as the treatment (same funds/agency/target pop/type of labor).

So what does it mean? Policy mattered in the 1960s. In treated counties from 1964-1984, LSPs explain:

9-15% of the change in AFDC

18-22% of the change in nonmarital births

(They explain less of the national change b/c they didn’t do anything in untreated places!)

The results do not come from growing “generosity”, but from knocking down barriers that kept eligible families off welfare.

In fact, we find *smaller* effects on nonmarital births in states that allowed married couples to get AFDC (ie. "more" generous).

If you pine for the “good old days” with low welfare receipt, understand that it came from incredibly arbitrary and unconstitutional restrictions on poor women’s access. LSPs rightly saw this as a problem and worked to fix it.

https://twitter.com/agoodmanbacon/status/1160947030698733569?s=20

We *cannot* infer whether families/children were better/worse off.

Single parenthood is really hard. It would take a lot to choose it.

But when LSPs began, some did. Maybe AFDC income was more stable. Maybe their counterfactual husband was abusive:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.109…

We've been working on versions of this for a long time now, so huge thanks to everyone who has seen it, commented, helped along the way (especially @martha_j_bailey who entered some of the data!).