The Rise in SSI Participation among Children: Assessing the Impact on Poverty and Maternal Labor Supply

Mark G. Duggan, University of Maryland
Melissa S. Kearney, The Brookings Institution

From 1989 to 1996 the number of children receiving benefits from the federal Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program increased by 260 percent to 955,000. Recent work has documented a shift of children from welfare to SSI during this period. In this paper we explore the determinants of the rise in child SSI participation and empirically investigate the causal effects on family poverty and maternal labor supply. We utilize an Instrumental Variables approach that exploits the fact that boys were 85 percent more likely than girls and that children from female-headed families were five times more likely than other children to enroll in SSI during the 1990s. Our findings suggest that among female-headed families, the increase in SSI participation resulted in an approximately 2 percentage point decline in child poverty and a 2 percentage point increase in maternal labor supply.