Welfare and the Well-Being of Children

向美国非老年、非残疾贫困人口提供资金转移计划的一个主要目标是改善贫困家庭儿童的福祉。过去，大多数致力于研究这些福利计划的研究都集中在这些计划对父母的激励效果上，而不是关于父母参与这些计划是否对儿童有可衡量的好处的问题。鉴于在这些转移项目上花费了大量资金，需要对父母参与对儿童的直接影响进行评估。该项目将审查母亲参与非洲发展方案、食品券计划和公共住房以及衡量其子女福祉的各种措施之间的关系。这些测量将包括孩子的出生体重、生长发育、健康以及心理和认知测试分数。这项研究将利用一个新的数据集，该数据集将母亲的福利参与与她孩子幸福的这些衡量标准联系起来：全国青年纵向调查合并了子女-母亲档案。

A primary goal of transfer programs to the non-aged, non-disabled poor in the U.S. is to improve the well-being of children in poor families. In the past, most of the research which has been devoted to the study of these welfare programs focuses on the incentive effects of the programs for parents rather than on the question of whether the parents' participation in such programs measurably benefits children. Given the large amounts spent on these transfer programs, an assessment of the direct effects of parental participation on children is called for. This project will examine the relationship between a mother's participation in AFDC, the Food Stamp Program, and public housing, and various measures of her child's well-being. These measures will include the child's birth weight, growth, health, and psychological and cognitive test scores. The study will take advantage of the availability of a new data set which links a mother's welfare participation to these measures of her child's well-being: the National Longitudinal survey of Youth Merged Child-Mother File.