No Evidence the Child Tax Credit Expansion Had an Effect on the Well-Being and Mental Health of Parents
In 1997 the US established the Child Tax Credit, which offers payments to parents of dependent children to help defray child-rearing costs. In 2021 a temporary expansion to the Child Tax Credit increased the size of payments, extended payments to families with low or no earnings, and distributed payments monthly instead of annually. Quasi-experimental evidence from the US and experimental evidence from low- and middle-income countries shows that moderate-to-large cash transfers improve subjective well-being and mental health. We estimated the Child Tax Credit expansion’s effects on the subjective well-being and mental health of adult recipients, using data from the Understanding America Study, a nationally representative survey with more than 7,000 respondents and more than 2,700 unique respondents with children. We found no evidence that the Child Tax Credit expansion had a significant short-term impact on measures of life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression symptomology among adult recipients. We speculate that the null effects may be due to the expansion’s temporary nature.
Suggested Citation:
Glasner, Benjamin, Oscar Jiménez-Solomon, Sophie M. Collyer, Irwin Garfinkel, and Christopher Wimer. 2022. No evidence the Child Tax Credit expansion had an effect on the well-being and mental health of parents. Health Affairs, vol. 41, no. 11. Access at: https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2022.00730