The Long Term Impact of Income Transfers During Childhood

描述（由申请人提供）：最近的文献表明，不良的早期生活条件会对教育、劳动力市场结果和死亡率产生负面的长期影响。然而，关于诸如向贫困家庭转移收入等公共政策是否能有效改善年轻人的基本状况的证据很少。我们建议通过评估母亲养老金（MP）项目对死亡率、残疾、收入和教育程度的影响，首次分析现金转移（福利）对受助儿童的长期影响。研究结果将更好地为决策者提供有关收入转移的潜力的信息，以减少童年环境差异对终生社会经济地位和健康差异的影响。MP计划（1911-1935）是美国第一个由政府资助的有受抚养子女家庭的福利计划，也是现在被称为TANF的联邦计划的基础。在国家计划中，在资格（仅丧偶与包括被遗弃/离婚妇女），每月养老金金额和持续时间以及接收条件（无条件，母亲工作或儿童上学）方面存在相当大的差异。[我们收集了1911年至1935年间在14个州申请的80,000多名被接受和被拒绝的MP申请人的信息。我们正在将这些个人数据与来自社会保障局的信息进行匹配，这些信息包括死亡日期、残疾申请/收据和收入，以及1940年人口普查和第二次世界大战（二战）入伍记录中的信息，包括完成学业的年数、职业、身高和智商，以及1940年的收入（目标1）。据我们所知，该数据集将构成第一个将儿童早期状况与中期和长期结果联系起来的大规模记录集，并且将为研究目的提供包含公共数据的去识别关联数据集。我们将使用这些数据来评估儿童时期现金转移对中期和长期结果的影响，使用依赖于构建适当对照组的识别技术。这些包括在同一县和年份被拒绝的申请人，在有严格资格要求的县（例如，仅限寡妇）中不符合条件的母亲（例如，离婚或被遗弃的母亲），以及在没有建立，

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Recent literature documents that adverse early-life conditions can have negative long-term effects on education, labor market outcomes, and mortality. However, there is scant evidence as to whether public policies such as income transfers to poor families can effectively improve the underlying conditions of the young. We propose the first analysis of the long-term effects of cash transfers (welfare) on recipient children by evaluating the effects of Mothers' Pension (MP) programs on mortality, disability, earnings and educational attainment. The results will better inform policy-makers regarding the potential for income transfers to reduce the impact of disparities in childhood circumstances on lifetime differences in socioeconomic status and health. MP programs (1911-1935) were the first government sponsored welfare program for families with dependent children in the U.S. and served as the basis for the federal program that is currently known as TANF. Among the state programs, there was considerable heterogeneity in eligibility (widowed only vs. inclusion of abandoned/divorced women), amount of monthly pension and duration, and conditions of receipt (unconditional, maternal work, or child school attendance). [We have collected information on over 80,000 accepted and rejected MP applicants in 14 states who applied between1911 and1935. We are in the process of matching these individual data with information from the Social Security Administration that includes date of death, disability application/receipt, and earnings, as well as to information from the 1940 census and World War II (WWII) enlistment records on years of completed schooling, occupation, height and IQ, and 1940 income (Aim 1). To our knowledge, this dataset will constitute the first large-scale collection of records for which early conditions in childhood can be linked with medium and long-term outcomes and a de-identified linked dataset containing the public data will be made available for research purposes. We will use these data to evaluate the impact of cash transfers in childhood on medium and long-term outcomes using identification techniques that rely on the construction of appropriate control groups. These include rejected applicants in the same county and year, ineligible mothers (e.g., divorced or abandoned mothers) in counties with strict eligibility requirements (e.g., widows only), and widowed mothers in states that did not establish, or were very late to establish, a mothers pension program (Aim 2). Finally, we are developing new econometric techniques for using imperfectly matched data. The current state of the art is to limit analysis to only perfectly or uniquely matched data, but this unnecessarily discards a great deal of information (all unmatched and multiply matched data) and ignores measurement error (some individuals are incorrectly matched). We are developing econometric techniques that will make use all of the information in the data (unique, multiple and no matches) by approximating the process that generates the data using reasonable parametric models and also estimating bounds (Aim 3).]