Joseph Mullins on Valuing Parental Time and Children's Development in the Design of Cash Transfer Programs

Poverty Research & Policy

When it comes to cash transfer programs like welfare for single parents and especially mothers, most of the evaluation and economic modeling efforts have focused on how those programs impact the amount of paid work single parents do. However, there's been less attention to the value of parental time and how that matters for children's development. For this podcast episode, we hear from economist Joseph Mullins of the University of Minnesota, who developed an economic model for U.S. cash transfer programs that attempts to place an accurate value on parents' time when assessing cash transfers programs. He says his model suggests a very different structure for our cash transfer programs if we want to best balance children's need for money resources and parental time for their healthy development.

Link to the paper: http://www.josephlyonmullins.com/DesigningCashTransfers_Children_Draft.pdf