Childhood Safety Net Investments and Childhood Health

• In Event: Children, Poverty, and the Safety Net

Abstract

Effective provision of safety net supports through the state may positively affect children’s health and development by augmenting access to resources both within and outside of the home, with benefits accruing across the life course. Much existing evidence on the effects of early-life exposure to safety net policies considers the long-run effects of policies implemented in the early to mid-twentieth century, finding that many social welfare programs have been effective in reducing child poverty and health improvements well into adulthood (Wimer et al. 2016; Bailey et al. 2024). The U.S. social welfare system has changed strikingly in recent decades, however, including increasing state discretion over and variation in the use of both state and federal funds (Greenberg et al. 2021; Schmidt et al. 2023). 

Drawing on multiple sources of data on state-level safety net generosity merged with individual-level data, this paper examines the effects of early life exposure to multiple safety net programs across birth cohorts on health outcomes in middle childhood. First, the State Safety Net Database (Schmidt et al. 2024) contains simulated benefits for TANF, CTC, federal and state EITC, SNAP, eligibility for public health insurance (eligible in the year of birth), and total cash and food benefit amounts. These simulated generosity measures afford the opportunity to generate causal estimates of the effect of policy changes on child outcomes. Second, we use data on per-child public spending in states from federal, state, and local sources between 1997-2022 from the State-by-State Spending on Kids Dataset (Isaacs et al. 2020). Spending includes comparable categories to the State Safety Net Database: income supports, SNAP, and health, as well as education and other relevant spending. We link these two state-level spending datasets, using state and year identifiers, to child-level data from the 2016 to 2024 waves of the National Survey of Children's Health (NSCH), a large, nationally and state representative cross-sectional survey.

We start by examining associations between our measures of state-level spending and household-level benefits. Next, we examine the effects of early-life exposure to safety net generosity on health outcomes across childhood using multiple birth cohorts. Following Schmidt et al. (2023), we assess the reduced form relationship between plausibly exogenous state-year level measures of program generosity and outcomes at ages 0 to 17. To strengthen the validity of our results, we exploit the fact that we have both simulated benefit generosity in each state and year and actual aggregate state spending by program. We control for state and year FE and time-varying state characteristics using multivariate descriptive and two-way fixed effects approaches, and testing income, SNAP, and tax credit spending and benefits separately and together. While the descriptive associations between state spending and health cannot provide causal estimates of the impact of state-level spending on child outcomes, they augment our quasi-experimental analyses and shed light on patterns over time and state in actual expenditures and health. Findings will shed light on how contemporary social policies surrounding the birth of a child support their health and development.

Authors

• Taryn W. Morrissey, American University
  Presenting Author

• Tara Watson, Brookings Institution
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Margot Jackson, Brown University
  Non-Presenting Co-Author