Head Start is the oldest and largest federally funded preschool program in the United States. From its inception in 1965, Head Start not only provided early childhood education, care, and services for children, but also sought to promote parents' success. However, almost all evaluation studies of Head Start have focused solely on…

This paper estimates the impact of New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) on school attendance and other educational outcomes in the following school year for a large sample of low-income high school students. The program provides summer jobs and training to youth aged 14 to 21, and due to high demand allocates slots through a…

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We used the random assignment in Project STAR (the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio experiment) to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on…

From 1991 to 2009, the fraction of Medicaid recipients enrolled in HMOs and other forms of Medicaid managed care (MMC) increased from 11 percent to 71 percent. This increase was largely driven by state and local mandates that required most Medicaid recipients to enroll in an MMC plan. Theoretically, it is ambiguous whether the shift from…

Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench do little to convince the authors of this paper that they have identified policy prescriptions that might usefully be applied to the United States. Caspar, Hartwig, and Moench suggest that in countries with high shares of temporary contract workers, employment reductions were sharper (because they could be). But does an…

Since the onset of the Great Recession, the U.S. labor market has been reeling. Public concern has largely focused on the unemployment rate, which rose to double digits and has since been stalled at just over 9 percent. This rate is unacceptably high, and macroeconomic policy efforts have been unsuccessful in bringing it down. The overall…

This paper provides estimates for a comprehensive set of social benefits and costs associated with the federal Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program. The impact categories for which we provide empirical estimates include the value of the voucher to recipients; additional services and public benefits induced by voucher receipt; improvements in…

This study uses data from an experimental employment program and instrumental variables (IV) estimation to examine the effects of maternal job loss on child classroom behavior. Random assignment to the treatment at one of three program sites is an exogenous predictor of employment patterns. Cross-site variation in treatment-control differences is…

New Hope, an employment-based poverty-reduction intervention for adults evaluated in a random-assignment experimental design, had positive impacts on children's achievement and social behavior two and five years after random assignment. The question addressed in this paper was the following: Did the positive effects of New Hope on younger children…

This paper examines the noncustodial parent earned income tax credit (NCP EITC), a new type of credit recently enacted in New York and Washington, D.C., and proposed by Senator Bayh and then-Senator Obama in 2007. The NCP EITC offers an earned income tax credit to low-income noncustodial parents who work and pay their full child support. This…

This paper examines whether state governments perform systematically less environmental enforcement of facilities in communities with higher minority and low-income populations. Although this is an important claim made by environmental justice advocates, it has received little attention in the scholarly literature. Specifically, I analyze state…

Academics and policymakers have argued that the ability of low- and moderate-income families to move into desirable suburban areas is constrained by the high cost of housing. Local zoning and other forms of land use regulation are believed to contribute to increased housing prices by reducing supply and increasing the size of new housing. Suburban…

In most states, child support paid on behalf of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants is used to offset TANF and child support administrative expenditures; this policy primarily benefits taxpayers. In contrast, Wisconsin allowed most custodial parents to keep all support paid on their behalf. This policy, which treats welfare…

Cigarette smoking is concentrated among low-income groups. Consequently, cigarette taxes are considered regressive. However, if poorer individuals are much more price sensitive than richer individuals, then tax increases would reduce smoking much more among the poor and their cigarette tax expenditures as a share of income would rise by much less…

This paper examines the relationship between income and the extent of material hardship and explores other factors that might affect hardship. Using panel data from the Women's Employment Study, we examine the incidence of material hardship from 1997 to 2003 among current and former welfare recipients. We then consider the extent to which income…