Program meeting on children.

PositionNational Bureau of Economic Research conference

On November 13, the NBER's Program on Children, directed by Janet Currie of NBER and University of California, Los Angeles, met in Cambridge. They discussed the following papers:

Wei-Yin Hu, University of California, Los Angeles, "Welfare and Family Structure: Do Higher Benefits Cause Teenagers to Leave the Next?"

Thomas S. Dee, Georgia Institute of Technology, and William N. Evans, NBER and University of Maryland, "Teen Drinking and Educational Attainment: Evidence from Two-Sample Instrumental Variables Estimates"

V. Joseph Hotz, NBER and University of California, Los Angeles, and Seth Sanders, Carnegie-Mellon University, "Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Very Natural Experiment"

John Cawley and Edward Vytalacil, University of Chicago, and James J. Heckman, NBER and University of Chicago, "The Optimal Policy to Reward the Value Added by Educators"

Sanders Korenman, NBER and Baruch College, and Robert Kaestner and Theodore S. Joyce, NBER and City University of New York, "The Effect of Pregnancy Intentions on Child Development"

Karen Norberg, NBER and Boston Medical Center, "Children's Medical and Psychological Well-being, Questions and Data Sources"

David M. Blau, NBer and University of North Carolina, "The Effect of Child Care Characteristics on Child Development"

Hu tests whether teenagers' decisions to leave or stay in welfare families respond predictably to welfare benefits. He uses a unique dataset that is particularly attractive in two ways: 1) variation in welfare benefits arises from a controlled social experiment in California; and 2) the longitudinal survey provides information on the whereabouts of all children, including those who have left the household. Hu finds that teenagers with children of their own respond to higher benefits by moving out of their parents' households. These findings imply that increasing income through welfare benefits has a perverse destabilizing effect on poor families and alters the share of income received by different family members.

Recent research has suggested that one of the important, life-cycle consequences of teen drinking is reduced scholastic achievement. Furthermore, it has been argued that state excise taxes on beer and minimum legal drinking ages (MLDA) can have a positive impact on educational attainment. Dee and Evans use the increases in the state MLDA during the late 1970s and 1980s as a source of variation in teen drinking, and data from the 1977-92...

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