Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Black-White Child Poverty Gap in the United States

Black children in the United States are more than twice as likely as white children to live in poverty. While past research has primarily attributed this phenomenon to the family structure of black children, this paper investigates how state-level heterogeneity in social assistance programs contributes to the black-white child poverty gap. I find that racial inequities in states’ administration of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program contributed to the impoverishment of approximately 256,000 black children per year from 2012-2014. State-year panel data demonstrates that states with larger percentages of black residents are less likely to prioritize the ‘provision of cash assistance’ but more likely to allocate funds toward the ‘discouragement of lone motherhood.’ Neutralizing inequities in states’ TANF spending priorities would reduce the black-white child poverty gap by up to 15 percent – comparable to the reduction effect of moving all children in single-mother households to two-parent households.