We assess the impact on family functioning and child well-being of the New Hope Project, a random-assignment anti-poverty program. New Hope's treatment provides job-search assistance, wage supplements that raise income above the poverty threshold, and subsidies for health insurance and child...

This study compares two explanations for the effects of an employment-based anti-poverty intervention, the New Hope project, on parenting and child behavior. (1) Did the New Hope intervention directly affect child behavior and, if it did, is this the result of New Hope effects on earlier...

Policymakers have long recognized child care as a key ingredient in low-income parents' employability. We examine the effects of expansions in child care policies that were bundled with a mix of employment-related policies and implemented as part of several random assignment studies on families'...

The proportion of adolescents in the United States who are obese has nearly tripled over the last two decades. At the same time, schools, often citing financial pressures, have given students greater access to “junk” foods and soda pop, using proceeds from these sales to fund school...

This paper seeks to determine whether a causal relationship exists between maternal employment and childhood overweight. We use matched mother/child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and employ econometric techniques to control for observable and unobservable differences across...

Obesity rates in the U.S. have skyrocketed in the last 30 years. Among adults, obesity rates more than doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Children obesity rates nearly tripled over the same period. This article discusses why obesity is of interest from an economic perspective. It...