Child care and early education subsidies are an important part of government efforts to increase economic independence and improve development of children in low-income families in the United States. This chapter describes the main subsidy programs in the U.S., discusses economic issues that...

We assess the role of child care in the welfare to work transition using an unusually large and comprehensive data base. Our data are for Massachusetts, a state that began welfare reform in 1995 under a federal waiver, for the period July 1996 through August 1997. We find that both the nature of...

Empirical attempts to link teenage out-of-wedlock births to the incentive structure of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) have met with mixed results. This has suggested to many researchers that, while the AFDC program contains incentives for poor women to have children...

I examine the effects of the introduction of the Spouse's Allowance to the Canadian Income Security (IS) system on the retirement behavior of couples. This program was effectively targeted at females in couples attempting to live on a single pension. It allowed qualifying spouses to receive the...

Growth in overall real welfare expenditures per capita has been a noted trend in the last thirty years in the U.S. The influence of demographic forces in contributing to this growth is considered in this paper. It is found that the growth of female-headed families is the strongest and dominant...

I argue for thinking of program evaluation as a decision problem. In the context of California's GAIN experiment (a randomized trial of a welfare-to-work alternative to AFDC), I show that GAIN first-order stochastically dominates AFDC when considering the choice between the treatment and control...

The transformation of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a more generous, inclusive monthly payment marks a historic (temporary) shift in U.S. treatment of low-income families. To investigate the initial impact of these payments, we apply a series of difference-in-difference estimates using Census...

We conduct a benefit-cost analysis of a U.S. child allowance, based on a systematic literature review of the highest quality available causal evidence on the short- and long-term effects of cash and near-cash transfers. In contrast to the previous studies we synthesize, which tend to measure a...

A vast literature has examined the impact of family income on the health and development outcomes of children. One channel through which increased income may operate is an improvement in a family's ability to provide food, shelter, clothing, books, and other expenditure-related inputs to a...

Child care subsidies are an important part of federal and state efforts to move welfare recipients into employment. One of the criticisms of the current subsidy system, however, is that it overemphasizes work and does little to encourage parents to purchase high-quality child care. Consequently,...