Publications

This analysis updates the share and profile of children left out of the full federal Child Tax Credit, revealing 17 million children (25% of children under age 17) were left behind in 2023.

This data identifies the share of children left out of the full federal Child Tax Credit in 2022  by state and congressional district.

This brief situates the 2023 poverty numbers in a long-term historical perspective using four alternative poverty measures to identify trends and the impact of government policies and programs over time

Given the sharp and sustained increase in poverty since 2021, this policy brief examines what 2023 child poverty could have been if an expanded Child Tax Credit, such as the American Family Act, had been in place. 

This policy memo identifies how inadvertent inequities in payment timing for newborns arose in current law and in some prior versions of proposals for permanent expansion. It explains how the 2023 American Family Act—a proposal relevant to the forthcoming 2025 federal tax debate—would deliver monthly Child Tax Credit benefits to all eligible newborns moving forward.

This study finds that temporary expansion of the childless EITC helped reduce material hardship among young adults.

This update records the refinements we have made to our benefit-cost child allowance model to date.

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 academic article shows that earnings and distress have a reciprocal relationship, with strongest evidence for prime working-age adults, those with below bachelor’s education, and Hispanics.

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.

This policy brief examines what 2023 child poverty could have been if an expanded Child Tax Credit had been continued.

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.

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.