One of the more heated topics of debate in the poverty and family literatures centers around the question of intergenerational welfare use. That is, to what extent is the use of we handed down from parents to children? Further, what is the mechanism generating such a pattern? Several studies have examined these issues and have tended to find a correlation between parents' and children's use of welfare (Chambre, 1985; Dolinsky, Caputo, & O'Kane, 1989; Gottschalk, 1990; 1992; Gottschalk, McLanahan, & Sandefur, 1994; Hill & Duncan, 1987; Hill & Ponza, 1984, 1989; Kimenyi, 1941; McLanahan, 1988; Solon, Corcoran, Gordon, & Laren, 1988). However, these analyses have largely failed to ascertain the determinants behind such a dynamic. Critical variables such as the human capital characteristics of the parental family have often been neglected. As a result, Robert Moffitt (1992) noted in his review of the literature, "The interpretation of the observed correlations is highly ambiguous.... There has been little attempt to model the intergenerational transmission of poverty and low income itself, which should logically precede the modeling of the transmission of welfare participation" (p. 37). Or as Duncan, Hill, and Hoffman (1988) observed regarding the higher probability of daughters using welfare who also come from parental homes that used welfare: Children from AFDC-dependent homes generally have fewer parental resources available to them, live in worse neighborhoods, go to lower quality schools, and so forth. Any of these factors could have an effect on their chance of receiving AFDC that is independent of the effect of their parents' AFDC receipt (p. 469). In this article we use a large, nationally representative data set in order to examine the dynamics of intergenerational welfare use and the potential determinants behind such dynamics. Our study addresses three major questions. First, what is the percentage of welfare recipients who were raised in households in which their parents also received welfare? Second, is there a greater likelihood of adult children receiving welfare if their parents in fact received welfare? And third, assuming that there is a greater likelihood, what is the mechanism that underlies it? The research reported here is unique in two respects. First, this is the only study that we are aware of that examines intergenerationally the full range of individuals and families receiving welfare, not just female-headed families, using a nationally representative sample of all American households. Second, we are able to empirically test two major competing conceptual models that have been posited to explain intergenerational welfare use. Previous research has been marked by its absence of a theoretical understanding of the intergenerational use of welfare, which has been a critical oversight. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORKS Two major competing conceptual frameworks have been implicitly proposed for understanding why an intergenerational connection should exist with regard to the use of welfare. We have called these the welfare and economic models (see Figure 1).(Figure 1 omitted) Both frameworks assume that children who come from families where parents received welfare would themselves be more likely to use welfare. In both models there is a hypothesized correlation between parents' welfare use and lower economic background: In order to qualify for public assistance, households must have low levels of income and assets. Finally, both models also assume that less favorable human capital and household characteristics (e.g., lower education, fewer skills, female-headed families, greater numbers of children, etc.) are connected with a greater risk of using welfare. Such variables have been shown in previous research to be highly significant in understanding welfare use (e.g., Bane Ellwood, 1983; Danziger, Sandefur, & Weinberg, 1994; Duncan, 1984; Ellwood Bane, 1994; Moffitt, 1992; Rank, 1994). …