A substantial number of American children experience poverty: about 17 percent of those under the age of eighteen meet the government’s definition, and the proportion is even greater within minority groups. Childhood poverty can have lifelong effects, resulting in poor educational, labor...

Developmental differences between children growing up in poverty and their higher-income peers are frequently reported. However, the extent to which such differences are caused by differences in family income is unclear. To study the causal role of income on children's development, the Baby's...

This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program's effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and...