My colleague Ahmed Ahmed and I summarized research on fertility in the context of the US Child Tax Credit expansion in this UBI Center report last year. We cited the Lyman Stone article from here:
Stone’s research suggests that making it permanent could close between 15% and 65% of the gap to a replacement fertility rate.
My nonprofit PolicyEngine has also been scoping how to predict fertility impacts in our app that computes the impact of custom tax and benefit reforms. Our shallow dive hasn’t turned up standard elasticities with respect to current-year policy changes though, so while we could create ones like % change to births with respect to % change to net income of parents of newborns, I don’t know how well this would connect well to the literature.
In general, though, Stone finds that baby bonuses are most cost-effective at spurring births. Other evidence suggests that reducing infant poverty improves developmental outcomes more cost-effectively than interventions later in life, and baby bonuses could be easily administered at any level of government (just run payments through the hospitals). In my view, that all makes baby bonuses an underexplored plausibly cost-effective intervention, both from a lobbying/policy perspective and through philanthropic means (a la GiveDirectly).
My colleague Ahmed Ahmed and I summarized research on fertility in the context of the US Child Tax Credit expansion in this UBI Center report last year. We cited the Lyman Stone article from here:
My nonprofit PolicyEngine has also been scoping how to predict fertility impacts in our app that computes the impact of custom tax and benefit reforms. Our shallow dive hasn’t turned up standard elasticities with respect to current-year policy changes though, so while we could create ones like % change to births with respect to % change to net income of parents of newborns, I don’t know how well this would connect well to the literature.
In general, though, Stone finds that baby bonuses are most cost-effective at spurring births. Other evidence suggests that reducing infant poverty improves developmental outcomes more cost-effectively than interventions later in life, and baby bonuses could be easily administered at any level of government (just run payments through the hospitals). In my view, that all makes baby bonuses an underexplored plausibly cost-effective intervention, both from a lobbying/policy perspective and through philanthropic means (a la GiveDirectly).