We examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother's receipt of benefits … Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that children's welfare exposure is substantial. By age 10 over one-third of all … children will have lived in a welfare household; black, non-Hispanic children face a much higher rate of exposure. Simple …

The stylized fact that individuals who come from families with more children are disadvantaged in the schooling process … children's educational achievement might be spurious. We extend these recent analyses of spuriousness versus causality using a … sibship size on children's private school attendance and on their likelihood of being held back in school. Specifically, we …

Using birth certificates matched to schooling records for Florida children born 1992-2002, we assess whether family … gap in neonatal health. We conclude that the gender gap among black children is larger than among white children in … substantial part because black children are raised in more disadvantaged families …

Parents may have important effects on their children, but little work in economics explores whether children …'s schooling opportunities crowd out or encourage parents' investment in children. We analyze data from the Head Start Impact Study …, which granted randomly-chosen preschool-aged children the opportunity to attend Head Start. We find that Head Start causes a …