Publications

This brief provides insights into the impact of government assistance on shaping racial and ethnic inequities in child poverty. It provides an update to a prior analysis of the Black-White child poverty gap and introduces new findings on the Latino-White child poverty gap.

This publication discusses the structure of the Child Tax Credit and its effects on childhood poverty and other indicators of well-being during three distinct phases of the American Rescue Plan.

This brief, released by the International Labour Organization (ILO) with UNICEF and the Learning for Well-Being Institute and featuring two CPSP co-authors, provides a resource for countries looking to enhance an existing child benefit policy or establish a universal child benefit.

This policy brief reviews the research on the potential impact of cash payments to families during pregnancy on birth and longer term outcomes.

This brief examines the impact of counting children as full recipients of Economic Impact Payments and other direct cash payments. Counting children fully in cash payments has a significant impact on poverty reduction.

This fact sheet provides estimates of the impacts of the 2021 Child Tax Credit on child poverty in each state. 

Today in the United States, unlike in the past, the public policies that do the most to reduce U.S. poverty are also those that do the most to increase inequality among low-income households. This article’s findings reveal that recent state-led antipoverty efforts have placed the near poor and the deeply poor on divergent paths.

The 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion included the one-third of children formerly left out of the full credit and resulted in historic poverty reduction. The expansion’s expiration excluded these children once again and child poverty rates rose sharply in response. This analysis updates the share and profile of children left out of the full Child Tax Credit in 2022, representing 26% of all children.

The sharp spike in child poverty from 2021 to 2022 represents the largest year-over-year increase on record and is largely the result of the expiration of the 2021 temporary Child Tax Credit expansion. This policy brief examines what 2022 child poverty could have been if an expanded Child Tax Credit had been continued.

This paper estimates the benefits and costs of a proposed New York State policy reform to provide child care subsidies to families up to three times the federal poverty line while supplementing child care worker compensation, alongside alternative program design options. It estimates a net present value of $12.4 billion in yearly social benefits relative to a yearly cost of $1.6 billion.

In partnership with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this NBER working paper is the first to use nationally-representative expenditure data to examine the impact of the expanded Child Tax Credit on household spending. Families used the monthly payments to enhance child and household well-being, mainly on food, housing, and child-related goods and services.

This study investigates the effects of the monthly and the lump-sum expanded Child Tax Credit payments on food and housing hardship in the United States. Families were more likely to use the monthly benefits to purchase food, but the lump-sum benefits to catch up on rent payments.

This working paper, released by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, investigates the effects of food assistance on racial disparities in the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Income transfers that reduce poverty during childhood can contribute to reduced poverty in adulthood and also reduce racial gaps.

This analysis features a fundamental tax reform converting personal deductions and credits into an income guarantee along with higher marginal tax rates.

This benefit-cost analysis examines the potential effects of the Limit, Save, Grow Act (H.R. 2811 in the 118th Congress) that would change state Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) work participation requirements in ways that could result in states restricting or eliminating TANF cash assistance for families with children. Every $1 in TANF cash assistance payments lost to families per year would cost society $8 per year, with the worst case scenario costing society close to $30 billion per year.

In this report published by The Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution, CPSP affiliate Bradley Hardy and CPSP researchers examine the state variation in poverty reduction effects of the 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit. The greatest level of poverty reduction was seen in states with relatively lower costs of living and higher pre-expansion poverty rates.

This research brief examines the potential anti-poverty impact of a federal birth grant, including in combination with a child allowance. It shows that a birth grant can significantly reduce poverty rates among infants and their families during the first year post birth.

This article examines the associations among employment status, income supports, poverty, and material hardship and whether the safety net buffers against financial hardship among households with unstable employment. Consistent unemployment is strongly associated with low income and poverty status, but not material hardship. Findings also suggest that cash transfers effectively buffer against the negative impact of persistent unemployment, while in-kind transfers appear more important for the unstably employed.

This article shows the reduction in child protective services involvement resulting from implementation of three of the policy packages from a recent National Academy of Sciences proposal to reduce child poverty: child allowance and expansions to the earned income tax credit; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; and the federal minimum wage.

This report examines the impact that the New York City minimum wage increases in 2017, 2018, and 2019 had on low-wage workers in the Poverty Tracker sample, looking specifically at earnings, poverty, material hardship, employment, and benefit receipt. The increases contributed to a significant increase in annual earnings of minimum wage workers and did benefit workers that were more likely to face poverty and material hardship.

This fact sheet examines the impacts of the 2021 American Rescue Plan expansion of the childless portion of the Earned Income Tax Credit on poverty rates. For all childless adults, but especially for young adults, the temporary expansion of the childless Earned Income Tax Credit enhanced its antipoverty effects.

This article uses data from two longitudinal studies of well-being in New York City to show that the 2021's expanded monthly Child Tax Credit led to significant declines in experiences of material hardship and multiple hardships, running out of money, and use of food pantries. It did not show evidence of the monthly payments reducing parents’ employment or affecting their mental health.

This article uses the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to reveal that racial differences in childhood poverty are more consequential than differential attainment of education, employment, and family formation benchmarks in shaping racial differences in young adult poverty.

This report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University on behalf of Share Our Strength details state options on how to use state Child Tax Credits to dramatically reduce child poverty.