This paper investigates how government antipoverty programs in the United States can support the development of disadvantaged children. I accomplish this by formalizing and estimating a model in which maternal investments of time and money determine child outcomes. Mothers choose these investments, their labor supply, and their program participation subject to constraints on their time and budg...

Social scientists do not agree on the size and nature of the causal impacts of parental income on children's achievement. We revisit this issue using a set of welfare and antipoverty experiments conducted in the 1990s. We utilize an instrumental variables strategy to leverage the variation in income and achievement that arises from random assignment to the treatment group to estimate the causal...

Antipoverty initiatives strive to improve distressed communities by producing outputs, such as housing, new businesses, and enhanced social services, and by building the capacity of communities to address their own problems. Although crucial for addressing the social and cultural factors contributing to community problems and for the sustainability of initiatives, capacity building is frequentl...