Some new results on family policies and women

Most estimates of the impact of parental leave entitlement on female labor market outcomes range from negligible to weakly positive. There is stronger evidence that spending on early education and childcare increases labor force participation of women and reduces gender gaps.

That is from a new NBER paper by Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo.  A different new paper, by Hope Corman, Dhaval Dave, Ariel Kalil, and Nancy E. Reichman, offers these results:

We find that welfare reform led to reduced youth arrests for minor crimes, by 7-9 %, with similar estimates for males and females, but that it did not affect youth arrests for serious crimes. The results from this study add to the scant literature on the effects of maternal employment on adolescent behavior by exploiting a large-scale social experiment that is still in effect to this day, and provide some support for the widely-embraced argument that welfare reform would discourage undesirable social behavior, not only of mothers, but also of the next generation.

Overall I still consider Clinton-era welfare reform to be underrated.

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