This paper explores the potential benefit of enforcement in Child Support policies to child mortality rates. Exploiting the sharp changes in Child Support laws across states and over the years 1975-1993, we find that adoption of a full set of policies reduces the child death rate by 23% relative...

Despite theoretical advances, measurement issues have impeded empirical research on aspirations. We quantify political aspirations in a developing country by estimating individuals' willingness to trade-off family size for political candidacy. Utilizing quasi-experimental variation in legal...

Aimed at increasing the adoption rate of older children, Minnesota's 2015 Northstar Care Program eliminated the adoption penalty (the decrease in fostering-based financial transfers associated with adoption) for children aged six and older, while maintaining it for children under age six. Using...

This study investigates the satisfaction of Italian adoptive parents with their experience and the support by specialised operators (i.e., accredited bodies and local public social services) using the survey data of 280 adoptive families. Inter-country adoption is a voluntary family choice....

This paper presents novel causal evidence on the effects of pro-natalist financial incentives on babies. I exploit rich spatial and temporal variation in cash transfers provided to families with newborn babies and the universe of birth, death, and migrant registry records in South Korea. I...

This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age six and find that removal significantly increases test scores and...

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis makes use of administrative data on the entire population of students in the fifth grade, collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational System...

Foster care youth are a large population that have reliably been shown to be at high risk of poor adult outcomes that are costly to both former foster youth and the public. We evaluate the effects of placing foster children with extended family, rather than unrelated caregivers, using...

Assembling information from several sources and a drawing on specially designed new survey, this paper finds that the shortfall in the supply of child care facilities remains large with respect to potential demand but is less severe with respect to the effective demand by households in Italy....