In recent years, child care subsidies have become an integral part of federal and state efforts to move economically disadvantaged parents from welfare to work. Although previous empirical studies consistently show that these employment-related subsidies raise work levels among this group,...

Most public expenditure on childcare in the US is made through a federal program, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), established as part of landmark welfare reform legislation in 1996. The main goal of the reform was to increase employment and reduce welfare dependence among low-income...

We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child's outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children...

In this paper, we explore the deep economic crisis experienced by the Turkish economy in 2001 and 2008 as quasi-experiments to causally identify the association between economically challenging conditions in-utero and child's birth weight. First, we utilize the temporal and spatial variations of...

Parenting is widely considered to be among the most important influences on early childhood (EC) development. But to what extent and under what circumstances can EC parenting programs improve child learning outcomes? While substantial progress has been made toward addressing these questions in...

We investigate women's fertility, labor and marriage market responses to large declines in child and maternal mortality that occurred following a major medical innovation in the US. In response to the decline in child mortality, women delayed childbearing and had fewer children overall. Fewer...

Between 2011 and 2014, Texas enacted three pieces of legislation that significantly reduced funding for family planning services and increased restrictions on abortion clinic operations. Together this legislation creates cross-county variation in access to abortion and family planning services,...

The opioid epidemic is a national public health emergency. As the number of fa- tal overdoses and drug abuse skyrockets, children of opioid-dependent parents are at increased risk of being neglected, abused or orphaned. While some studies have examined the effects of policies introduced by...

While the rise in childhood obesity is clear, the policy rami cations are not. School nutrition programs such as the School Breakfast Program (SBP) have come under much scrutiny. However, the lack of experimental evidence, combined with non-random selection into these programs, makes...

In this paper, we implement Bayesian potential outcomes model to evaluate the impact of program interventions using non-randomized data. The approach jointly addresses selection bias in program placement, heterogeneous treatment intensity among the treated, and heterogeneity in treatment...