Career: The Effects of Public Policy on Families with Children: New Evidence from Multiple Large-Scale Data Sets

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Millions of families face challenges of work-family balance, single parenthood, and poverty. Public policies could improve the lives of families dealing with these issues, but the intended impacts of these policies may not be achieved if families respond to policies in unpredictable ways. Moreover, policies with overlapping goals that are targeted at the same families could either work together to benefit these families or work against each other. Understanding how these policies comprehensively affect families---working independently or together---is essential for informing government spending decisions, and thereby advancing national health, prosperity, and welfare. This CAREER research program combines multiple large-scale data sets with experimental research methods to better understand the effects of public policies on family outcomes and promote the progress of economic science. Specifically, the research project will study the effects of paid family leave, joint custody laws, and major U.S. social safety net programs on family outcomes. This proposal's education plan centers on training students---especially women, who are under-represented in the economics profession---to shape the next generation of researchers who will be involved in public policy. The results of this research project will have profound influence on the conduct of public policy towards families, hence increase the well-being of Americans. This CAREER research project has four components. The first project uses population-level administrative data to estimate the impacts of California's paid family leave (PFL) benefits on leave duration, labor market outcomes, and repeat leave-taking among new parents with a regression kink research design. This project provides some of the first estimates of the effects of the PFL benefit amount, holding other policies constant. The second project will identify the causal effects of joint legal custody, which grants both parents the right to make key decisions about their children's welfare and is increasingly promoted by legislation in the developed world, on family outcomes. This project will use Danish administrative data on custody court cases linked to four other administrative data sets to track the economic, family formation, and mental and physical health outcomes of the parents and children in each case. To identify causality, the project will leverage random assignment of custody cases to judges, who differ in their propensity to grant joint legal custody. The third project will analyze the long-term effects of U.S. safety net programs with data on millions of current adults, focusing on two questions: (i) Do safety net programs ameliorate adverse long-term consequences of early childhood economic shocks? (ii) Do these programs complement or substitute each other in their long-term impacts on adult outcomes? The analysis will use difference-in-difference and event-study designs, exploiting variation from the county-by-county rollout of major programs, and variation in local labor demand. The fourth component is a mentoring workshop that connects female economics PhD students with mentors who are in the early stages of their careers both within and outside academia.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.