Child care subsidies play a critical role in facilitating the transition of disadvantaged mothers from welfare to work.However, little is known about the influence of these policies on children's health and well-being.In this paper, we study the impact of subsidy receipt on low-income children's weight outcomes in the fall and spring of kindergarten.The goals of our empirical analysis are twofold.We first utilize standard OLS and fixed effects methods to explore body mass index as well as measures of overweight and obesity.We then turn to quantile regression to address the possibility that subsidy receipt has heterogeneous effects on children's weight at different points in the BMI distribution.Results suggest that subsidy receipt is associated with increases in BMI and a greater likelihood of being overweight and obese.We also find substantial variation in subsidy effects across the BMI distribution.In particular, child care subsidies have no effect on BMI at the lower end of the distribution, inconsistent effects in the middle of the distribution, and large effects at the top of the distribution.Our results point to the use of non-parental child care, particularly centerbased services, as the key mechanism through which subsidies influence children's weight outcomes.
Recent policy proposals call for significant new investments in early care and education (ECE). These policies are designed to reduce the burden of child care costs, support parental employment, and foster child development by increasing access to high-quality care, especially for children in lower-income families. In this paper, we propose and calibrate a model of supply and demand for different ECE service and teacher types to estimate equilibrium family expenditures, participation in ECE, maternal labor supply, teacher wages, market ECE prices, and program costs under different policy regimes. Under a policy of broadly expanded subsidies that limits family payments for ECE to no more than 7% of income among those up to 250% of national median income, we estimate that mothers’ employment would increase by six percentage points while full-time employment would increase by nearly 10 percentage points, with substantially larger increases among lower-income families. The policy would also induce a shift from informal care and parent-only care to center- and home-based providers, which are higher-quality on average, with larger shifts for lower-income families. Despite the increased use of formal care, family expenditures on ECE services would decrease throughout most of the income distribution. For example, families in the bottom three income quintiles would experience expenditure reductions of 76%, 68%, and 55%, respectively. Finally, teacher wages and market prices would increase to attract workers with higher levels of education. We also estimate the impact of a narrower subsidy expansion for families with an income up to 85% of national median income.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
This paper uses a rich employer-employee matched data set to investigate the existence and the extent of nonprofit and part-time wage and compensation differentials in child care. The empirical strategy adjusts for workers' self-selection into the for-profit or nonprofit sectors, into full-time or part-time work, as well as for unobserved worker heterogeneity using a discrete factor model. We find differences between the regimes (full-time for-profit, full-time nonprofit, part-time for-profit, part-time nonprofit) in the manner in which human capital characteristics of the workers are rewarded. There is substantial variation in wages as a function of employee characteristics, and there is variation in wages within sectors. The results indicate that part-time jobs are "good" jobs in center-based child care, and there exist nonprofit wage and compensation premiums, which support the property rights hypothesis.
Over the past four decades, mass shootings have caused at least 1,000 deaths and 1,500 injuries in the US, but little is known about how these tragedies influence people beyond those directly affected. This study uses nationally representative data from the Gallup-Healthways survey to assess spillover effects of mass shootings on individuals' community and emotional wellbeing. Leveraging differences in the timing of mass shootings across counties between 2008-2016, we find that these incidents reduce community and emotional wellbeing for at least three months post-shooting. Mass shootings have high societal costs and create adverse effects that extend beyond those immediately exposed.
Abstract In this paper, we examine the impact of U.S. child‐care subsidies on the cognitive and behavioral development of children in low‐income female‐headed families. We identify the effect of subsidy receipt by exploiting geographic variation in the distance that families must travel from home to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, our instrumental variables estimates suggest that children receiving subsidized child care in the year before kindergarten score lower on tests of cognitive ability and reveal more behavior problems throughout kindergarten. An auxiliary analysis of longer‐run outcomes shows that these negative effects largely disappear by the time children finish first grade.
This paper estimates the effect of child care subsidies on the standard work decision of single mothers and examines whether this effect differs between welfare recipients and nonrecipients. The analysis uses data from the 1999 National Survey of America's Families. Results suggest that child care subsidy receipt is associated with a 6.9 percentage point increase in the probability of single mothers' working at standard jobs. When the effect of subsidy receipt is allowed to differ between welfare recipients and nonrecipients, results indicate that welfare recipients who are offered a child care subsidy are 14 percentage points more likely to work at standard jobs than others. Among nonrecipients, child care subsidy receipt increases standard work probability by only 1.8 percentage point. These findings underscore the important role of child care subsidies in helping low income parents, especially welfare recipients, find jobs with conventional or standard schedules. The results also lend support to the policy of giving priority to welfare recipients for child care subsidies. Results are found to be robust to several specification checks.
This study examines the impact of instruction modality on student learning outcomes, with a focus on disparities observed pre- and post-pandemic. Using administrative data from a public university spanning seven pre-pandemic and five post-pandemic semesters, the analysis controls for endogenous sorting using fixed effects. The findings suggest that face-to-face (FtF) instruction results in better student performance, such as higher grades and a lower withdrawal rate. Additionally, students with greater exposure to FtF instruction are less likely to repeat courses, more likely to graduate on time, and achieve higher Grade Point Averages (GPA). The study also shows that the FtF advantage has been decreasing over time, and the differences are smaller post-pandemic. The results are consistent across student and instructor characteristics, except for Honors and graduate students, where the FtF advantage is either smaller or statistically insignificant.
