Effects of Welfare Reform Policies on Mexican Immigrants' Infant Mortality Rates

Rosa M. Cho, Brown University

The welfare reform bill, adopted in 1996, limited the eligibility of immigrants for federal funding for welfare use, while vesting states with the authority to create new state-funded substitute benefits for immigrants. This paper capitalizes on this inter-state variation in state welfare rules regarding new immigrants and estimates a triple difference-in-difference estimator that provides evidence on the impact of removing public assistance on Mexican immigrants' infant mortality rates. Using the U.S. linked birth and infant death cohort files from 1995 to 1996 and from 1999 to 2002, I find that infant mortality rates rose among low-educated Mexican immigrant women, especially for those residing in less affluent metropolitan counties within their own state. These findings suggest that there may be unintended social costs associated with the immigrant provision of PRWORA.

  See paper

Presented in Session 149: Infant and Child Mortality