Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

We use data from the American Community Surveys and variation across states and time in legal access to same-sex marriage to study how marriage equality policies affect children's health insurance profiles. Prior work has examined effects on adult health insurance profiles, but ours is the first to our knowledge to examine children. We estimate difference-in-differences models for children in same-sex couple households compared to children in different-sex couple households. Our findings will have important implications for cost-benefit analyses of extending full marriage equality.