Universal Full-Day Kindergarten and Maternal Labor Supply: A Life-Cycle Analysis.

We estimate the effect of state-level policies enacting universal free full-day kindergarten on mothers' labor supply using a life-cycle analysis. Similar to previous research on childcare and labor supply, we find that free full-day kindergarten increases labor force participation rates for mothers whose youngest child is kindergarten-aged by 4.3 to 7.1 percentage points. We find that for mothers whose youngest child is an infant, labor force participation increases by 7.2 to 9.8 percentage points, and for women whose youngest child is 3 to 4 years old labor force participation increases by 5.9 to 7.9 percentage points. The fact that the policies impact the labor supply for mothers of younger-than-kindergarten-age children by even more than for mothers of kindergarten-aged children is important for understanding the full effect of subsidized childcare. This is consistent with a life-cycle model of labor supply where wages and prices in future periods impact mothers' labor force attachment.

Isolating a culture of son preference among Armenian, Georgian and Azeri Parents in Soviet-era Russia.

A basic hypothesis is that cultural evolutionary processes sustain differences between groups, these differences have evolutionary relevance and they would not otherwise occur in a system without cultural transmission. The empirical challenge is that groups vary for many reasons, and isolating the causal effects of culture often requires appropriate data and a quasi-experimental approach to analysis. We address this challenge with historical data from the final Soviet census of 1989, and our analysis is an example of the epidemiological approach to identifying cultural variation. We find that the fertility decisions of Armenian, Georgian and Azeri parents living in Soviet-era Russia were significantly more son-biased than those of other ethnic groups in Russia. This bias for sons took the form of differential stopping rules; families with sons stopped having children sooner than families without sons. This finding suggests that the increase in sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus, which began in the 1990s, reflects a cultural preference for sons that predates the end of the Soviet Union. This result also supports one of the key hypotheses of gene-culture coevolution, namely that cultural evolutionary processes can support group-level differences in selection pressures that would not otherwise occur in a system without culture.

The Lasting Effects of Early-Childhood Education on Promoting the Skills and Social Mobility of Disadvantaged African Americans and Their Children.

This paper demonstrates the long-term intragenerational and intergenerational benefits of the HighScope Perry Preschool Project, which targeted disadvantaged African-American children. We use newly collected data on the original participants through late middle age and on their children into their mid-twenties. We document long-lasting improvements in the original participants' skills, marriage stability, earnings, criminal behavior, and health. Beneficial program impacts through the childrearing years translate into better family environments for their children leading to intergenerational gains. Children of the original participants have higher levels of education and employment, lower levels of criminal activity, and better health than children of the controls.

Marriage and divorce during a pandemic: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on marital formation and dissolution in Mexico.

In this study, we consider the initial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on family formation and dissolution. We use national microdata covering all marriages and divorces in Mexico, an event-study design and a difference-in-difference specification. Our findings indicate that over March through December of 2020, marriage rates declined by 54% and divorce rates by 43%. By the end of 2020, divorce rates recover back to baseline levels, but marriage rates remain 30% below the 2017-2019 baseline level. Overall, our findings suggest that marital dissolutions quickly recovered (6 months into the pandemic), but at the end of 2020, family formation remained at persistently lower levels.

Gender Wage Gap and Male Perpetrated Child Sexual Abuse.

Given the fact that child abuse and intimate partner violence often co-occur, intra-household bargaining models provide a useful framework to investigate the relationship between macro-economic factors and child sexual abuse (CSA). Non-cooperative bargaining models predict that labor market opportunities that benefit women improve their bargaining power and lead to lower levels of intimate partner violence against them. We posit that this protective effect extends to children as well, and exploit exogenous variation in macro-economic factors to examine the impact of gender specific wages and employment on police reported CSA in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia from 2006 to 2019. The empirical analysis provides evidence that narrowing the gender wage gap leads to a decline in police reported CSA incidents perpetrated by mothers' intimate partners, whereas improvements in relative employment opportunities do not yield any such effects. Consistent with previous literature, our results show that wages, not employment, determine bargaining power. The findings also underscore important spillover benefits of policy solutions directed towards narrowing the gender wage gap.

Unconditional Cash and Family Investments in Infants: Evidence from a Large-Scale Cash Transfer Experiment in the U.S.

Economists have limited causal evidence on how families receiving unconditional income would spend those funds. We examine financial and time investments in infants among families living in poverty from a large-scale, multi-site randomized controlled study of monthly unconditional cash. We find increased spending on child-specific goods and mothers' early-learning activities with their infants. The marginal propensity to consume child-focused items from the cash transfer exceeded that from other income, consistent with the behavioral cues in the design. We find no statistically detectable offsets in household earnings or impacts on pre-registered outcomes related to expenditures, labor supply, childcare or subjective well-being.

Home, but Left Alone: Time at Home and Child Abuse and Neglect During COVID-19.

We use high-frequency mobile phone movement data and quick-release administrative data from Georgia to examine how time at home during the COVID-19 pandemic is related to child maltreatment referrals. Findings show that referrals plummeted by 58% relative to previous years, driven by fewer referrals from education personnel. After this initial decline, however, each 15 minutes at home was associated with an increase in referrals of material neglect by 3.5% and supervisory neglect by 1%. Our results describe how children have fared during the initial wave of the pandemic, and the results have long-term implications for child development and well-being.

Sibling Spillovers: Having an Academically Successful Older Sibling May be More Important for Children in Disadvantaged Families.

This paper examines causal sibling spillover effects among students from different family backgrounds in elementary and middle school. Family backgrounds are captured by race, household structure, mothers' educational attainment, and school poverty. Exploiting discontinuities in school starting age created by North Carolina school-entry laws, we adopt a quasi-experimental approach and compare test scores of public school students whose older siblings were born shortly before and after the school-entry cutoff date. We find that individuals whose older siblings were born shortly after the school-entry cutoff date have significantly higher test scores in middle school, and that this positive spillover effect is particularly strong in disadvantaged families. We estimate that the spillover effect accounts for approximately one third of observed statistical associations in test scores between siblings, and the magnitude is much larger for disadvantaged families. Our results suggest that spillover effects from older to younger siblings may lead to greater divergence in academic outcomes and economic inequality between families.

Parenting Promotes Social Mobility Within and Across Generations.

This paper compares early childhood enrichment programs that promote social mobility for disadvantaged children within and across generations. Instead of conducting a standard meta-analysis, we present a harmonized primary data analysis of programs that shape current policy. Our analysis is a template for rigorous syntheses and comparisons across programs. We analyze new long-run life-cycle data collected for iconic programs when participants are middle-aged and their children are in their twenties. The iconic programs are omnibus in nature and offer many services to children and their parents. We compare them with relatively low-cost more focused home-visiting programs. Successful interventions target both children and their caregivers. They engage caregivers and improve the home lives of children. They permanently boost cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Participants in programs that enrich home environments grow up with better skills, jobs, earnings, marital stability, and health, as well as reduced participation in crime. Long-run monetized gains are substantially greater than program costs for the iconic programs. We investigate the mechanisms promoting successful family lives for participants and report intergenerational effects on their children. A study of focused home-visiting programs that target parents enables us to isolate a crucial component of successful programs: they activate and promote parenting skills of child caregivers. The home-visiting programs we analyze produce outcomes comparable to those of the iconic omnibus programs. National implementation of the programs with long-run follow up that we analyze would substantially shrink the overall US Black-White earnings gap.

Impacts of Publicly Funded Health Insurance for Adults on Children's Academic Achievement.

Empirical evidence demonstrates that publicly funded adult health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has had positive effects on low-income adults. We examine whether the ACA's Medicaid expansions influenced child development and family functioning in low-income households. We use a difference-in-differences framework exploiting cross-state policy variation and focusing on children in low-income families from a nationally representative, longitudinal sample followed from kindergarten to fifth grade. The ACA Medicaid expansions improved children's reading test scores by approximately 2 percent (0.04 SD). Potential mechanisms for these effects within families are more time spent reading at home, less parental help with homework, and eating dinner together. We find no effects on children's math test scores or socioemotional skills.

Using Intentions to Predict Fertility.

On average, childless women observed by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics report that they intend to have more children than they actual have. A collection of intentions that record only whether respondents intend to have another child can more accurately predict the number of children they have. Errors in the formation of intentions are not required to explain this finding. Rather, if intentions record a survey respondent's most likely predicted number of children, then the average of these intentions does not necessarily equal average actual fertility, even if intentions are formed using rational expectations.

Short-run and Long-run Effects of Peers from Disrupted Families.

I study the short-run and long-run effects of exposure to peers from disrupted families in adolescence. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) data, I find that girls are mostly unaffected by peers from disrupted families, while boys exposed to more peers from disrupted families exhibit more school problems in adolescence and higher arrest probabilities, less stable jobs and higher probabilities of suffering from financial stress as young adults. These results suggest negative effects on non-cognitive skills but no effect on cognitive skills, as measured by academic performance. The dramatic increase in family disruption in the United States should thus receive more attention, as the intergenerational mobility and inequality consequences could be larger than anticipated as a result of classroom spillovers.

The impact of the COVID-19 recession on Mexican households: evidence from employment and time use for men, women, and children.

This study examines changes in labor supply, income, and time allocation during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. Using an event-study design, we show that the COVID-19 recession had severe negative consequences for Mexican households. In the first month of the pandemic, employment declined by 17 percentage points. Men recovered their employment faster than women, where men's employment approaches original levels by 2021Q2. Women, on the other hand, experienced persistent employment losses. Within-household, men also increased their time spent on household chores while neither gender (persistently) increased their time caring for others. Instead, children reduced their time spent on schoolwork by 25%.

The Long-Run Effects of Recessions on Education and Income.

This paper examines the long-run effects of the 1980-1982 recession on education and income. Using confidential Census data, I estimate difference-in-differences regressions that exploit variation across counties in recession severity and across cohorts in age at the time of the recession. For individuals age 0-10 in 1979, a 10 percent decrease in earnings per capita in their county of birth reduces four-year college degree attainment by 15 percent and earnings in adulthood by 5 percent. Simple calculations suggest that, in aggregate, the 1980-1982 recession led to 1.3-2.8 million fewer college graduates and $66-$139 billion less earned income per year.

Inequality in Early Care Experienced by US Children.

Using every major nationally representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children spend less total time with their parents and more time in the care of others. Non-parental care for high-SES children is more likely to be in childcare centers, where average quality is higher, and less likely to be provided by relatives where average quality is lower. Even within types of childcare, higher-SES children tend to receive care of higher measured quality and higher cost. Inequality is evident at home as well: measures of parental enrichment at home, from both self-reports and outside observers, are on average higher for higher-SES children. We also find that parental and non-parental quality is reinforcing: children who receive higher quality non-parental care also tend to receive higher quality parental care.

Suddenly a stay-at-home dad? Short- and long-term consequences of fathers' job loss on time investment in the household.

Commonly described as "gender care gap", there is a persistent gender difference in the division of unpaid domestic responsibilities in developed countries. We use German survey data to provide novel evidence on short- and long-run effects of an exogenous shock on paternal availability, through a job loss, on the intra-household allocation of domestic work. We find that paternal child care and housework significantly increase in the short run on weekdays, while we do not see any similar shifts on weekends. Effects are positive and persistent for fathers who remain unemployed or have a working partner, but reverse after re-employment. We also find significant changes for female partners as well as in cumulative household time investments and outsourcing of tasks. Our results are in line with theoretical predictions regarding time availability and financial constraints, while we find no strong evidence for changes in bargaining powers, gender role attitudes or emotional bonding.

Do Financial Incentives Aimed at Decreasing Interhousehold Inequality Increase Intrahousehold Inequality?

Research has shown that giving disadvantaged families financial incentives to invest in their children could decrease socioeconomic inequality by enhancing human capital formation. Yet, within the household how are such gains achieved? We use a field experiment to investigate how parents allocate time when they receive financial incentives. We find that incentives increase investment in the target child. But, parents achieve these gains by substituting away from time spent with the child's sibling(s). An unintended consequence is that intrahousehold inequality increases and aggregate gains from the program are overstated when focusing only on target children.

Demographic Transition, Human Capital and Economic Growth in China.

We assess the impact of demographic changes on human capital accumulation and aggregate output using an overlapping generations model with endogenous savings and human capital investment decisions. We focus on China as it has experienced rapid changes in demographics as well as human capital levels between 1970 and 2010. Additionally, further variations in demographics are expected due to the recently introduced two-child policy. Model simulations indicate that education shares and income per capita will be lower with a fertility rebound as compared to status quo fertility. We find education policy to be effective in mitigating these adverse outcomes associated with higher fertility. While long-run declines in output per capita can be offset by a 4.7% increase in the government education budget, it requires a 28% increase to achieve the same outcome in the short-run.

Is there a correlation between total fertility rate, utilization of assisted reproduction technology, and national wealth in Europe?

AIM: To explore the relationships between total fertility rate (TFR), utilization of assisted reproduction technology (ART), and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Europe. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Analysis of total ART cycles obtained from the latest European IVF-Monitoring Consortium (EIM) report for 2016. TFR, GDP and population size for that year were found in relevant World Bank data documents. In addition, this study compared two subgroups in Europe: developed economies and economies in transition, as defined by the UN. Pearson Correlations were calculated using Sigmaplot for utilization, GDP and TFR. RESULTS: Forty countries were included in the 2016 EIM report. The mean utilization rate was 1,391 cycles per million population (C/M) (range = 162-3156) and mean TFR was 1.61 (range = 1.26-2.73). Mean GDP was $35,072 per capita (range = $10,610-$110,650). There was no correlation between TFR and utilization or GDP, however there was a significant positive correlation between GDP and utilization (correlation coefficient = 0.428; p = 0.00661). In the developed economies (n = 28) GDP and utilization were roughly 3-times higher than in the economies in transition (n = 11) ($42,710 vs $15,630; 1,674 vs 671), with a slightly lower TFR (1.58 vs 1.67). In the developed economies there was no correlation between GDP, TFR, and utilization, while in the economies in transition, the only significant correlation was GDP vs TFR (r = 0.69; p = 0.017). CONCLUSIONS: There is a strong correlation across Europe between GDP and utilization of ART. This correlation does not exist within the developed economies. In Europe the utilization of ART treatment is dependent on national wealth and not on the TFR in the country.

Covid-19 shocks to education supply: how 200,000 U.S. households dealt with the sudden shift to distance learning.

Among the extraordinary shocks to household life caused by the Covid-19 pandemic was the sudden shift to distance learning in K-12 schools. Gone were Monday through Friday routines of school day, extracurricular activities, and evening homework; schools scrambled to launch alternative delivery systems, expecting parents to step in and spend significant amounts of time helping children continue to learn. This study examines the sudden shift to distance learning using data from U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey. Conducted weekly from April through July 2020, the survey tracked COVID-related shocks to employment, health, food and housing security, and education in the U.S. population. We use Pulse data on 200,000 households with K-12 children to examine how school systems shifted, how parents stepped up and spent time helping children learn, how parental time inputs varied with parent education, and how education changes intersected with other pandemic shocks, including job loss and food insecurity. We find that parents and children spent significantly more time in learning activities when their schools provided diversified educational inputs, especially live contact time with teachers; live contact hours also facilitated children learning on their own. Given the type of alternative schooling, less educated parents spent no less time helping children than better educated parents, although they faced significantly more problems with computer and internet access. Thus, parents generally tried to help children continue learning in the pandemic, albeit with potentially wide variation in the resources they could supply to mitigate the drop in learning.