Essays on Family Policy, Fertility and Children's Outcomes.

family policy;Economics;Business and Economics;Economics

Malkova, OlgaBrown, Charles C. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: family policy;    Economics;    Business and Economics;    Economics;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113490/omalkova_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Governments around the world have long provided financial incentives that encourage and discourage childbearing with a goal of improving children’s outcomes. Empirical evidence concerning the effects of these interventions on childbearing and children’s outcomes is crucial to resolve on-going policy debates about whether to continue providing, expand, or introduce funding for such programs. However, the long-term effectiveness of these incentives remains an open question because of the difficulty of assessing the causal effects of interventions. My dissertation provides credible estimates of the effects of the introduction of various family policies in Russia and in the United States.The first and second chapters use newly-available data from Russian censuses to estimate the effect of introducing a maternity benefit program in Russia on short-term and long-term childbearing as well as on long-term children’s outcomes. The first chapter exploits the program’s two-stage implementation and finds evidence that women had more children as a result of the program. The program induced nearly 5 million births over its duration, where an extra birth cost the government about 1.4 times a year’s average national earnings. The second chapter finds that the program resulted in slightly lower educated cohorts, but had no other influence on many economic and family structure outcomes in adulthood. Thus, the maternity benefit program was able to induce more births, but there is little evidence that it induced extra costs on the government in the longer-term based on outcomes in adulthood of children born after the start of the program.The third chapter uses restricted American census data to estimate the effect of introducing family planning program funding in the United States on children’s economic well-being. This chapter finds that household incomes were 3 percent higher among children born after family planning programs began. These children were also 8 percent less likely to live in poverty and 11 percent less likely to live in households receiving public assistance.