Variation in tax policy presents an opportunity to estimate the responsiveness of fertility to prices. This paper exploits the introduction of a pro-natalist transfer policy in the Canadian province of Quebec that paid up to C$8,000 to families having a child. I implement a quasi-experimental...

This paper provides evidence on child penalties in female and male earnings in different countries. The estimates are based on event studies around the birth of the first child, using the specification proposed by Kleven et al. (2018). The analysis reveals some striking similarities in the...

This volume collects a series of essays by prominent economists on each of the major means-tested, or welfare, programs in the United States: the Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplemental Security Income,...

In this chapter I provide a brief history of the TANF program, including changes made as part of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. I then present a variety of program statistics, including trends in aggregate and state-level caseloads and spending, along with changes in the demographic composition...

Many poor households in developing countries are liquidity-constrained. As a result, they may under-invest in the human capital of their children. We provide new evidence on the long-term (10-year) effects of cash transfers using data from Ecuador. Our analysis is based on two separate sources...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic two new timely poverty measures have been developed to monitor fast-changing economic conditions for the most deprived. The Han et al. near real-time poverty measure uses responses to a global income question on the Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS)...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of recent welfare reforms, investigating the effects of both state-specific waivers in the early 1990s and the 1996 federal reform legislation. Unlike earlier work, we analyze a wide array of indicators, including welfare participation, labor market...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance....

The system of means-tested transfers in the U.S. has evolved in important ways over the last decade, with significant expansions of Medicaid , the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Supplemental Security Income program, and with significant contraction in Aid to Families with Dependent Children,...