This paper examines how providing families with lump-sum in-kind assistance during the pandemic affected food hardship, economic well-being, and maternal health. We study the introduction of a new program, P-EBT, that provided grocery vouchers worth approximately $300 per student during spring...

Card and Krueger (1992a,b) used labor market outcomes to study the productivity of school spending. Following their lead, we examine effects of post-1990 school finance reforms on students' educational attainment and labor market outcomes. Lafortune et al. (2018) show that these reforms...

We study the impact of post-1990 school finance reforms, during the so-called "adequacy" era, on absolute and relative spending and achievement in low-income school districts. Using an event study research design that exploits the apparent randomness of reform timing, we show that reforms lead...

This chapter provides an overview of the patchwork of U.S. food and nutrition programs, with detailed discussions of SNAP (formerly the Food Stamp Program), WIC, and the school breakfast and lunch programs. Building on Currie's (2003) review, we document the history and goals of the programs,...

School meals programs are the front line of defense against childhood hunger, and while the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools, the school breakfast program has lagged behind in terms of availability and participation. In this paper we use experimental...

President Obama's "Preschool for All" initiative calls for dramatic increases in the number of 4 year olds enrolled in public preschool programs and in the quality of these programs nationwide. The proposed program shares many characteristics with the universal preschools that have been offered...

A growing economics literature establishes a causal link between in utero shocks and health and human capital in adulthood. Most studies rely on extreme negative shocks such as famine and pandemics. We are the first to examine the impact of a positive and policy-driven change in economic...

In this paper, we examine what groups of children are served by core childhood social-safety net programs--including Medicaid, EITC, CTC, SNAP, and AFDC/TANF--and how that's changed over time. We find that virtually all gains in spending on the social safety net for children since 1990 have gone...

In this paper, we examine what groups of children are served by core childhood social-safety net programs—including Medicaid, EITC, CTC, SNAP, and AFDC/TANF—and how that's changed over time. We find that virtually all gains in spending on the social safety net for children since 1990 have...