Current research on participation in welfare programs suggests that although the majority of spells of program receipt are relatively short, a large proportion of recipients experience subsequent spells of program participation. To the extent that short periods off welfare represent failed attempts at self-sufficiency, a better understanding of why individuals who try to leave welfare fail should help in defining interventions that would encourage successful exits from program participation.

In this paper, we use data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine the dynamics of welfare participation and welfare recidivism. We focus on the patterns of participation in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and the relationship between changes in program participation and the timing of demographic and socioeconomic events within the family (e.g., births, marriage, divorce, and changes in employment status).

The paper is organized as follows. Section I outlines our empirical model; section II describes the data; section III presents the specification of the model we estimate; and section IV contains our estimation results. Section V presents the summary and conclusions.