Theory and evidence point towards particularly positive effects of high-quality child care for disadvantaged children. At the same time, disadvantaged families often sort out of existing programs. To counter differences in learning outcomes between children from different socioeconomic...

Labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings, transfers, and income. Yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts. We investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random-assignment data from Connecticut's Jobs First...

Advocates of a universal child care system offer a two-fold argument: Child care facilitates children's long-run development, and levels the playing field by benefiting in particular disadvantaged children. Therefore, a critical element in evaluating universal child care systems is to measure...

This paper summarizes our recent research on evaluating the distributional consequences of social programs. This research advances the economic policy evaluation literature beyond estimating assorted mean impacts to estimate distributions of outcomes generated by different policies and determine...

In general child care subsidies are widely accepted as a means to create equal chances for mothers in the labour market as well as for children. Although there is a general consensus that the use of child care should be publicly supported, there is no consensus on how this should be done....

We examine theoretically demand in a two-good economy where the demand of one good is influenced by either a spillover effect in the form of an externality from other consumers’ choices and or a conformity effect representing a need for making similar choices as others. A positive spillover...

Poverty measures in developing countries often ignore the distribution of resources within families and the gains from joint consumption. In this paper, we extend the collective model of household consumption to recover mother's, father's and children's shares together with economies of scale,...

This paper aims to estimate the price and income elasticities of the demand for essential commodities in Cote d'Ivoire. Using data from the 2002 Cote d'Ivoire Living Standard Survey and a theoretical framework developed by Crawford et al. (2003), we analyse price effects on the demand for groups...

We propose a method to identify bounds (i.e. set identification) on the sharing rule for a general collective household consumption model. Unlike the effects of distribution factors, it is well known that the level of the sharing rule cannot be uniquely identified without strong assumptions on...

We apply an extension of the Rothbarth approach to estimate the share of household resources accruing to children (i.e., the cost of children) in Ireland. The method also allows us to identify the economies of scale in the household and indifference scales in Lewbel (2003)’s sense. A practical...