Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children...

Foster care placement is strongly associated with crime--for example, close to one fifth of the prison population in the United States is comprised of former foster children--yet there is little evidence on whether this relationship is causal. Leveraging the quasi-random assignment of child...

We study the impacts of a policy designed to reward mothers who stay at home rather than join the labor force when their children are under age three. We use regional and over time variation to show that the Finnish Home Care Allowance (HCA) decreases maternal employment in both the short and...

In the United States, child support guidelines sometimes generate surprising and presumably unintentional child support amounts, especially in situations with extended visitation, shared parenting, and half-siblings. These are consequences of the ad-hoc mathematical formulas that are in common...

Foster care provides substitute living arrangements to protect maltreated children. The practice is remarkably common: it is estimated that 5 percent of children in the United States are placed in foster care at some point during childhood. These children exhibit poor outcomes as children and...

The foundations for successful child development are established in early childhood. Two main policy approaches for strengthening these foundations have been subsidized preschool programs and programs targeting the home environment. Our chapter reviews a large body of empirical work...

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly affected American children, including disruptions to their care and school settings. Children attending in-person child care or school have contended with unpredictable closures and time in remote school, which in turn is subject to its own types of...

The purpose of this paper is to examine issues related to the coverage of preventive care under national health insurance. Four specific kinds of medical care services are included under the rubric of preventive care: prenatal care; pediatric care, dental care, and preventive physicians' services...

This paper combines multiple sources of information on early childhood development in a unified model for analysis of a wide range of early childhood policy interventions. We develop a model of child care in which households decide both the quantities and qualities of maternal and non-maternal...