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Are Public Expenditures Associated with Better Child Outcomes in the U.S.? A Comparison across 50 States
Author(s) -
Harknett Kristen,
Garfinkel Irwin,
Bainbridge Jay,
Smeeding Timothy,
Folbre Nancy,
McLanahan Sara
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
analyses of social issues and public policy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.479
H-Index - 31
eISSN - 1530-2415
pISSN - 1529-7489
DOI - 10.1111/j.1530-2415.2005.00058.x
Subject(s) - generosity , confounding , psychology , inclusion (mineral) , test (biology) , developmental psychology , demographic economics , medicine , economics , social psychology , political science , paleontology , pathology , law , biology
Our article utilizes variation across the 50 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 a number of 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 reveal a strong relationship between state generosity toward children and children's well‐being.