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Abstract
Childhood poverty, particularly in early childhood and early school years, can take a toll on the well-being of children, who are the future workers and leaders of our society. The overarching question that this dissertation attempts to answer is whether and how income matters for child development. I examine the role of two U.S. income support programs, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), in mitigating the negative effects of poverty on child development across various dimensions in preschool to kindergarten-entry. In Chapter 2, I provide a conceptual framework that explicates the mechanisms through which income may affect child development. In doing so, I consider parental investment, family stress, and biological pathways. In Chapter 3, I provide empirical evidence on the effects of SNAP benefit generosity on children’s cognitive, socioemotional, and health outcomes. Partly due to lack of program rule variations in SNAP, there has been limited research on how SNAP benefits affect child well-being, particularly among young children. I draw on a novel approach to addressing the endogeneity of SNAP benefit amount, which employs the variation in the purchasing power or real value of SNAP benefits across regions and over time. Considering different timings of exposure to SNAP purchasing power in a child fixed-effects model, I find plausibly causal evidence that greater SNAP purchasing power has positive effects on cognitive and socioemotional development. In Chapter 4, I consider a combination of two income support programs, EITC and SNAP. Despite the growing evidence of high joint participation rates in these programs, until now no research has examined their potential interaction effects on child development. Using variations in state EITC policies and SNAP purchasing power across regions and over time within a child fixed-effects framework, this study provides new evidence that EITC and SNAP produce complementary effects on the cognitive and socioemotional development of children. Specifically, the effects of EITC on these outcomes increase as the level of SNAP benefits increases, indicating that the EITC is more effective at reducing the developmental gaps across socioeconomic status when it is coupled with larger SNAP benefits. This dissertation makes contributions to developmental science by showing the plausibly causal effects of income on cognitive and socioemotional development in a critical developmental stage. The dissertation also contributes to advancing social work and public policy knowledge, by demonstrating that two of the largest income support programs that impact millions of families with children in the U.S. could reduce the detrimental effects of poverty on young children’s development.