How welfare policies affect child and adolescent achievement

摘要

Recent research based on random-assignment experiments has found that the effects of welfare and employment policies appear to vary by children's developmental stage. Programs that increase parents' employment and income have been found to have either neutral or positive effects for preschool and early-school-age children in poverty, depending on the policy approach utilized (Pamela Morris et al., 2001). At the same time, negative effects have been observed for adolescent children (Lisa Gennetian et al., 2002), and the limited research on very young children has shown neutral effects (Morris and Charles Michalopoulos, 2000).