Did PRWORA's mandatory school attendance policy increase attendance among targeted teenage girls?

The purpose of this paper was to examine if the school-attendance requirement of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) significantly increased attendance among the teenage girls that the policy targeted. This study applied difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-difference methods to 12 years of cross-sectional data from the October Supplement of the Current Population Survey while isolating the effects of PRWORA from the effects of other factors that might have influenced the target population's school attendance. The findings indicated that PRWORA, overall, did not have significant positive impacts on school attendance; rather, the policy was associated with a small but significant reduction in school attendance of U.S.-born disadvantaged teenage girls between 1996 through 1999 and essentially no effects on the target population thereafter.

Research highlights
► PRWORA was associated with a small decrease in school attendance of target teenagers.
► The decrease occurred among U.S.-born disadvantaged girls in early reform years.
► PRWORA did not have enduring effects on teenagers’ school attendance in the 2000s.