Who benefits from child benefit?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Governments, over much of the developed world, make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children. For example, in the United States the recently introduced Child Tax Credit (CTC), which goes to almost all children, costs almost $1 billion each week, or about 0.4% of GNP. The United Kingdom has even more generous transfers and spends an average of about $30 a week on each of about 8 million children—about 1% of GNP. The typical rationale given for these transfers is that they are good for our children and here we investigate the effect of such transfers on household spending patterns. In the United Kingdom such transfers, known as Child Benefit (CB), have been simple lump sum universal payments for a continuous period of more than 20 years. We do indeed find that CB is spent differently from other income—paradoxically, it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult-assignable goods. In fact, we estimate that as much as half of a marginal dollar of CB is spent on alcohol. We resolve this puzzle by showing that the effect is confined to unanticipated variation in CB so we infer that parents are sufficiently altruistic toward their children that they completely insure them against shocks.
منابع مشابه
The long-run effect of maternity leave benefits on mental health: evidence from European countries.
This paper examines whether maternity leave policies have an effect on women's mental health in older age. We link data for women aged 50 years and above from countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to data on maternity leave legislation from 1960 onwards. We use a difference-in-differences approach that exploits changes over time within countries in the durat...
متن کاملImpact on widows of proposed changes in OASI mother's benefits.
This article examines the impact of a proposal that would terminate mother's and father's benefits when the youngest child in the care of a surviving spouse reaches age 16, rather than age 18, as in current law. Losses to families and savings to the social security program are estimated by taking into account 1977 benefit receipts and provisions in the Social Security Act that would have affect...
متن کاملBreastfeeding and Active Bonding Protects against Children’s Internalizing Behavior Problems
Breastfeeding is associated with numerous health benefits to offspring and mothers and may improve maternal-infant bonding. Ample evidence suggests breastfeeding can improve child neurodevelopment, but more research is needed to establish whether breastfeeding is linked to the development of child psychopathology. This paper aims to explore the effects of both breastfeeding and mother-child int...
متن کاملSpeed cameras in an urban setting: a cost-benefit analysis.
BACKGROUND To perform a cost-benefit analysis of the installation of speed cameras on the beltways of Barcelona. METHODS The analysis was performed from the society perspective over a 2-year period using a controlled before-and-after study design. The net benefit was calculated using, as benefits, the willingness to pay for the estimated number of people who avoided injury as a consequence of...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
- Economic inquiry
دوره 50 1 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2012