Do Public Expenditures Improve Child Outcomes In the U.S.: A Comparison Across Fifty States

Kristen Harknett, Irwin Garfinkel, Jay Bainbridge, Timothy Smeeding and Nancy Folbre
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Kristen Harknett: University of California, Berkeley
Irwin Garfinkel: Columbia University
Jay Bainbridge: National Center for Children in Poverty
Timothy Smeeding: Syracuse University
Nancy Folbre: University of Massachusetts, Amherst

No 958, Working Papers from Princeton University, School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Research on Child Wellbeing.

Abstract: Our paper utilizes variation across the fifty U.S. states to examine the relationship between public expenditures on children and child outcomes. We find that public expenditures on children are related to better child outcomes across a wide range of indicators including measures of child mortality, elementary-school test scores, and adolescent behavioral outcomes. States that spend more on children have better child outcomes even after taking into account potential confounding influences. Our results are robust to numerous variations in model specifications and to the inclusion of proxies for unobserved characteristics of states. Our sensitivity analyses suggest that the results we present may be conservative, yet our findings show that public investments in children yield broad short-term returns in the form of improved child outcomes.

Keywords: child outcomes; public expenditures; state policies; Medicaid; education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003-03
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:crcwel:wp03-02-harknett.pdf

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