We are pleased to announce the winners for our 2015-2016 Small
Grants for Poverty Research. All recipients will receive grants
to support their research projects related to the core themes of
the Center and will present at our 2017 Small Grants Conference.
Congratulations!
Abstract:
Head Start began in 1965 as a federal program targeting
low-income, preschool-aged children and their families for
comprehensive child development, health, and parenting services.
The program continues today, with an increased focus on early
childhood education, serving approximately 950,000 children at a
cost of nearly eight billion dollars per year. In this project,
we consider the impact of Head Start on the participating child’s
future family. Given quasi-experimental evidence of Head Start
effects on long-term outcomes for participants and related
evidence on the intergenerational effects of increased education,
Head Start participation effects may transfer across generations
in the form of improved outcomes for participants’ children. Such
a finding would substantially influence cost-benefit analyses of
the program and could inform current policy efforts around early
childhood investments. Using data from the National Longitudinal
Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Children and Young
Adults (C-NLSY) survey, we will leverage both sibling comparisons
and the rollout of the Head Start program in the late 1960s to
estimate the effect of mothers’ Head Start program participation
on their children’s educational attainment and labor market
outcomes, health, and risky behaviors. To combat cyclical
poverty, we must understand whether the government’s pivot to
non-traditional safety-net policies, such as early childhood
education, can break the intergenerational cycle that stacks the
odds against children. This question is directly relevant to the
center’s core research interests in (1) children and the
intergenerational transmission of poverty, and (2)
non-traditional safety net policies, and has implications for
policies designed to improve educational attainment and labor
market participation among impoverished families.
Abstract:
By most accounts, Medicaid is the largest federal anti-poverty
program. Yet even a half-century after the enactment of Medicaid
and Medicare, socioeconomic disparities in healthcare access
remain substantial, especially for non-elderly childless adults
who have been largely unaffected by expansions of these “Great
Society” programs (Hicken, 2012). The Medicaid and Marketplace
subsidy insurance expansions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
have the potential to reduce these disparities. However, as a
result of the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, about half the
states did not expand their Medicaid program. I propose to
exploit this state-level variation in Medicaid expansion, using
data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS),
2005-2015, to estimate the causal effect of ACA Medicaid policy
on socioeconomic disparities in access to care, and its resulting
influence on health. The results of my study are important for
ongoing state policy discussions around ACA Medicaid expansions
that have large implications for the wellbeing of low-income
Americans. I conclude with directions for further research on
Medicaid policy and poverty building on the work proposed in this
small grant application.
Abstract:
Family income affects children’s wellbeing and shapes their
future life chances. This stylized fact is at the core of
concerns over the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage,
whereby the socioeconomic circumstances into which children are
born are perpetuated across generations. Raising parents’ income,
as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) does, has the potential to
disrupt this process. Prior research shows that it is associated
with improvements in child health and educational achievement and
attainment. While evidence is accumulating about what happens as
a result of families’ EITC receipt, less is known about the
mechanisms through which children benefit from this annual income
boost. To address this question, the proposed study will use data
from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1996-2013, to investigate
whether and how parents’ spending on children—including on
enrichment activities and materials—is altered as a result of
EITC receipt. We test whether expenditures on children differ
between EITC-eligible and ineligible households in February (the
modal month of EITC receipt) compared to other months. We then
exploit changes in the federal EITC over time and variation in
state EITCs to examine whether higher EITCs are associated with
larger changes in expenditures on children. Findings will inform
how government antipoverty policy weakens the intergenerational
transmission of disadvantage for children growing up in
low-income households. This is timely knowledge, as the 2009 EITC
expansions are set to expire in 2017. Understanding how the EITC
shapes families’ abilities to invest in their children provides
important information for this upcoming policy debate.
