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This dissertation contains three empirical essays that explore the effects of natural disasters and family transitions on long-term child outcomes and short-term parental behavior. The first essay ("Impact of Shocks in Utero and in Early Life on Stunting: the Case of Philippines' Typhoons") assesses the long-term effects of natural disasters early in life on health outcomes, mainly stunting, and explores some of the possible channels causing those long term effects. The second essay ("Effects of Natural Disasters on Fertility Behavior: Evidence of Treatment Heterogeneity") assesses the effects of natural disasters also, typhoons in particular, on fertility behavior, and explores the existence of treatment heterogeneity. Finally, the third essay ("Parents' shared and solo time with children: Composition and correlates") studies different correlates of the composition of parental time investments under the perspective of a child, and explores how that composition changes when parents adapt to the birth of a new child.
In the second essay, I consider how U.S. families choose to invest in response to the onset of a health condition in a child. Family investments can reinforce, or compensate for the occurrence of a health-limiting condition. The results from this paper shed light on the importance of incorporating the family unit as part of public policies that involve children with serious health conditions.
Parental behavior has potentially large implications for child health and child economic outcomes. In three essays, I explore two topics: how the health behavior of parents impacts their children's health and wellbeing, and the degree to which policy can alter parental behavior such that child health improves. The first essay examines how cash transfers to pregnant single mothers via the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) improve child birth weight. The second essay shows that cigarette taxes reduce maternal smoking and improve childhood health outcomes. The final essay documents the correlation between parental and teen smoking using the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplement. As a whole, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how health transmits from parent to child, an important mechanism in the intergenerational transmission of inequality.
This dissertation studies the impact of welfare policies in India and the United States with an emphasis on the indirect effects on children’s well being. Welfare policies, especially policies that target poverty alleviation, have been shown to increase employment and family income. I explore their potential to have secondary effects on children’s health and education and to have long run effects. I analyze three large public welfare policies, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India, the WWII GI Bill in the United States and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the United States. The first chapter studies NREGA in India, the world’s largest public works program, which has increased employment and wages in rural India. Using a regression discontinuity with difference-in-difference empirical strategy based on a unique method used by the government to roll out the program in three phases, I find that the program significantly increased child health investments, reduced child mortality and increased children’s ability to complete math and reading exercises. The second chapter studies the WWII GI Bill in the United States, which provided generous education financial support to veterans and is popular for having increased college education. Using a regression discontinuity design based on the sharp fall in eligibility across birth cohorts due to the enlistment method, I find that the WWII GI Bill also caused a significant increase in high school completion and in the long run an increase in employment and a decrease in poverty. The third chapter studies the EITC in the United States, which is a tax credit scheme that supplements earned income and has increased employment particularly for single mothers with high school level of education or below. Using the differential increase in 1993 in the tax credit generosity across families with one child and families with two or more children, I find that the program increased child health insurance coverage, especially through private health insurance. The analyses of the three programs demonstrate that welfare policies can indirectly benefit children’s development and have positive effects in the long run, which should be included in their evaluation.
This dissertation focuses on the relationships between income support policy, economic security, and family dynamics that contribute to health and wellbeing. Chapters 1 and 2 examine potential consequences of exposure to tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC), for child maltreatment reports and intimate partner violence – two outcomes that are strikingly common in the United States and disproportionately experienced by those in low-income households. The third chapter is also related to the economic security of families. Typically, in studies of economic-wellbeing, measurement tends to occur at the household level, thereby obscuring patterns of ownership of economic resources within families. In chapter 3, I examine trends and patterns of liquid asset ownership within couples with children, with particular attention to how these patterns are shaped by gendered power dynamics. Chapter 1 leverages a natural experiment – created by a legislated change in the timing of the annual disbursement of EITC and CTC transfer payments to families – to estimate the association between EITC and CTC payments and child maltreatment reports in the period shortly after families receive payments from these programs. Using weekly tax refund data from the Internal Revenue Service linked to state-specific child maltreatment report data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System during the 2015 through 2018 tax seasons, I find evidence that reports of child maltreatment made to child welfare authorities decline in the weeks immediately following issuance of these lump-sum credits. My results imply that child maltreatment risk is responsive to not only chronic economic hardship but also to more immediate income availability among caregivers. Chapter 2 focuses on pregnant women’s exposure to intimate partner violence, which affects maternal health and birth outcomes. Using individual-level data from the 1996-2018 Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) and a difference-in-differences methodological approach, I find that expansions to the EITC were associated with lower risk of self-reported physical abuse during pregnancy. These effects are concentrated among mothers who are most likely to receive EITC benefits during pregnancy – those with lower levels of education and previous children. Given a broader literature documenting improvements in maternal-infant health associated with EITC expansions, reductions in violence against pregnant women may be one channel through which the EITC leads to maternal-infant health improvements. Chapter 3 uses data from the 1998-2019 waves of the Survey of Consumer Finances to examine patterns and trends in asset ownership within couples with children. Drawing on theories of bargaining power, I test the premise that differentials between partners – in their education, employment, and health status – are associated with each partner’s liquid asset ownership. I find that the proportion of couples with children who hold liquid assets in separately owned accounts has increased between 1998 and 2019. Both men and women have increasingly used separately owned accounts, but the median account balance was greater for men than women. I also find that proxies for intra-partner bargaining power are associated with the likelihood that women, but not men, separately own liquid assets. This study demonstrates the importance of considering intrahousehold allocations in studies of economic wellbeing. Together, these chapters contribute to our understanding of the downstream effects of income support policies for the health and wellbeing of recipients and their children as well as demonstrate the importance of considering how intrahousehold dynamics might condition the effects of such transfers.
[This dissertation examines issues in family demography and the role of public policy in shaping life course transitions including educational attainment, marriage, and family formation. The first two chapters focus on the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the largest cash transfer programs in the United States. Chapter one analyzes the impact of the EITC on the educational attainment of youth from low socioeconomic status families. Variation in state EITC policies is used to analyze the impact of increased household income on children's educational attainment. Results suggest that a $1,000 increase in state EITC generosity increases college enrollment among 18-23 year olds by 1 percentage point and increases college enrollment by 0.3 of a percentage point, a 10% increase in college completion among this group. Chapter two analyzes the marriage penalties associated with the EITC. First, I simulate a marriage market to predict the earnings of potential spouses and how a spouse's earnings impact EITC benefits. Multinomial regression models are then used to assess how an expected loss in EITC benefits upon marriage affects one's likelihood of marrying or cohabiting. Results suggest that approximately 65% of EITC recipients can expect to lose some of their EITC benefits upon marriage. The average EITC recipient can expect to lose approximately half of her EITC benefit, or about $1,050. A $1,000 expected loss in EITC benefits upon marriage is associated with a 1.8 percentage point decline in the likelihood of marrying, and a 1.1 percentage point increase in the likelihood of cohabiting. Chapter three (co-authored with Kelly Musick) examines variation in family formation among college graduates. We explore differences in the rates of childlessness among college-educated women across academic disciplines and examine potential mechanisms that may account for such differences. We find that women who major in health-related fields have the lowest levels of childlessness at around 16% by age 44, while women who major in the arts and humanities have the highest rates of childlessness, at 25%. We find that these differences are correlated with differences in early marriage patterns among women in these fields, as well as traditional gender role attitudes.].