Welfare Reforms and the Living Standards of Single Mothers: Evidence from Canadian Provinces. *
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper evaluates the impact of the 1995-1998 Ontario welfare reforms on the standard of living among single mothers. I look at how different measures of single mothers’ consumption vary in response to transfer income shocks. Because welfare is a provincial responsibility in Canada, this study is able to consider the effects of the welfare reforms in Ontario, in comparison with other Canadian jurisdictions at the same time. By utilizing a ‘difference in difference’ natural experiment design I compare the changes in the standard of living of Ontario single mothers to changes in the standards of living of three distinct control groups. The comparison with control groups under different provincial administrations and the implementation of propensity score matching estimates sets my approach apart from previous similar work. The results indicate an initial decrease in the relative standard of living of Ontario single mothers. The immediate policy impact has been largely reversed with the complete implementation of welfare reforms and the introduction of National Child Benefit program. I find that the traditional regression approach overestimates the immediate negative effects of policy changes and underestimates the subsequent recovery. I find that the results are sensitive to the choice of control group; the inclusion of geographically different control groups adds significant insight to the analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".