How Sibling Composition Affects Adolescent Schooling Outcomes When Welfare Reform Policies Increase Maternal Employment

Pooling across seven experimental studies, this paper examines the role of sibling composition in influencing the effects of 14 welfare and employment programs on adolescents. The findings confirm that these programs--that increase maternal employment--have unfavorable effects on schooling outcomes, decreasing adolescents' school performance, increasing grade repetition and increasing the likelihood of school dropout. Although sibling composition has no relationship with the unfavorable effects of these programs on adolescent's school performance, having a younger sibling does increase suspensions or expulsions and the likelihood of school dropout, possibly because adolescents are taking on additional responsibilities when their mother's employment increases.Adolescent; Schooling; Welfare

Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science: A New Framework to Support Early Childhood Interventions

Public policies have actively responded to an emergent social and neuroscientific evidence base documenting the benefits of targeting services to children during the earliest period of their development. But problems of low utilization, inconsistent participation, and low retention continue to present themselves as challenges. Although most interventions recognize and address structural and psycho-social barriers to parent’s engagement, few take seriously the decision making roles of parents. Using insights from the behavioral sciences, we revisit assumptions about the presumed behavior of parents in a developmental context. We then describe ways in which this framework informs features of interventions that can be designed to augment the intended impacts of early development, education and care initiatives by improving parent engagement

New Hope: A Thoughtful and Effective Approach to Make Work Pay

This paper makes the case for a national program offering the kind of work supports that were part of the New Hope program, a policy experiment that operated for three years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our policy, like New Hope, would provide a set of work supports for full-time workers-both parents and nonparents, men and women-that would lift them out of poverty as well as provide essential benefits in the form of health insurance and child-care subsidies for people who needed them. Across all of the people offered the chance to participate in the New Hope program, including single men, work increased and poverty rates fell. Children in New Hope families performed better in school, were more cooperative and independent and had fewer behavior problems and loftier schooling expectations than children in the control group. Because boys have a higher risk of school failure and behavior problems than girls do, it is noteworthy that New Hope was especially successful in improving their school performance and behavior. With its positive effects on children\u27s achievement and behavior, a scaled-up New Hope program may well help to break the cycle of poverty for a sizeable number of American families in the next generation. With reasonable assumptions about the long-term value of New Hope\u27s positive impacts on children, New Hope easily passes a cost-benefit test

The long‐term effects on children and adolescents of a policy providing work supports for low‐income parents

New Hope, an employment‐based poverty‐reduction intervention for adults evaluated in a random‐assignment experimental design, had positive impacts on children's achievement and social behavior two and five years after random assignment. The question addressed in this paper was the following: Did the positive effects of New Hope on younger children diminish or even reverse when children reached the challenges of adolescence (eight years after random assignment)? Small positive impacts on school progress, school motivation, positive social behavior, child well‐being, and parent control endured, but impacts on school achievement and problem behavior were no longer evident. The most likely reasons for lasting impacts were that New Hope families were slightly less likely to be poor, and children had spent more time in center‐based child care and structured activities. New Hope represents a model policy that could produce modest improvements in the lives of low‐income adults and children. © 2011 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/87035/1/20613_ftp.pd

Orange Sister

This book was completed for Jan Baker\u27s artists\u27 book class.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_bookmark_stories/1009/thumbnail.jp

Long-Term Neighborhood Effects on Low-Income Families: Evidence from Moving to Opportunity

We examine long-term neighborhood effects on low-income families using data from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) randomized housing-mobility experiment. This experiment offered to some public-housing families but not to others the chance to move to less-disadvantaged neighborhoods. We show that ten to 15 years after baseline, MTO: (i) improves adult physical and mental health; (ii) has no detectable effect on economic outcomes or youth schooling or physical health; and (iii) has mixed results by gender on other youth outcomes, with girls doing better on some measures and boys doing worse. Despite the somewhat mixed pattern of impacts on traditional behavioral outcomes, MTO moves substantially improve adult subjective well-being.Economic

Broken Sky

This book was completed for Jan Baker\u27s artists\u27 book class.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/specialcollections_bookmark_nature/1006/thumbnail.jp

Neighborhood Effects on the Long-Term Well-Being of Low-Income Adults

Nearly 9 million Americans live in extreme-poverty neighborhoods, places that also tend to be racially segregated and dangerous. Yet, the effects on the well-being of residents of moving out of such communities into less distressed areas remain uncertain. Using data from Moving to Opportunity, a unique randomized housing mobility experiment, we found that moving from a high-poverty to lower-poverty neighborhood leads to long-term (10- to 15-year) improvements in adult physical and mental health and subjective well-being, despite not affecting economic self-sufficiency. A 1–standard deviation decline in neighborhood poverty (13 percentage points) increases subjective well-being by an amount equal to the gap in subjective well-being between people whose annual incomes differ by $13,000—a large amount given that the average control group income is$20,000. Subjective well-being is more strongly affected by changes in neighborhood economic disadvantage than racial segregation, which is important because racial segregation has been declining since 1970, but income segregation has been increasing.Economic