Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Panel: Unintended Family Spillovers from Social Programs

(Poverty and Income Policy)

In the United States, social programs typically target select groups of vulnerable individuals, such as children, the elderly, or low-income single mothers, in order to achieve certain policy objectives, such as improving child health, alleviating hunger, or providing low-income working families with affordable childcare (Currie 2004). Most policy-oriented research evaluates the effectiveness of such programs based on the criterion of improving the welfare of the targeted population. Moreover, most previous analyses have not accounted for program impacts that extend beyond the target recipients through the channel of the multigenerational family. The proposed panel addresses this issue by considering the within-family spillover effects of multiple programs in the US social safety net. The four papers in this panel measure program impacts that extend beyond the targeted demographic group and explore within-family spillovers to both the children and the parents of designated recipients. Drawing on a variety of data sources and employing a range of causal inference techniques, these papers explore intra-family spillovers from a number of social safety net programs at the state and federal level, including cash assistance, in-kind transfers, and publicly-provided insurance. This wide range represents the diversity of programs that comprise the social safety net in the US. The first paper looks at the multigenerational effects of public health insurance by investigating whether women who were exposed to more generous Medicaid in childhood have healthier children. The second paper considers how TANF – a cash benefit targeted at low-income single mothers – shapes idleness and school enrollment behaviors of teenagers living in recipient households. The third paper studies the impacts of childcare subsidy policy on family caregivers by identifying how more generous subsidies for informal care impact the caregiving, labor supply, income, and health of grandmothers who provide subsidized childcare. Finally, the last paper looks at how unemployment spells and unemployment insurance affect the short and long term behavior and well-being of the affected workers' parents. Together, these papers demonstrate the presence of important within-family spillover effects of social safety net programs and argue for a broader approach to program evaluation that considers the more comprehensive and dynamic context of the multigenerational family.