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Worldwide, families with young children receive cash transfers from the state in the form of child allowances. Falling more often below poverty lines, children in larger families arguably have more to benefit from these transfers. In the Netherlands, payments used to go up with the number of children, but a flat, per-child payment came into force in 1995. While most previous studies have focused on short-term changes to family income and with no distinctions by family size, this policy was the source of long-lasting variation in family income, especially in large families. I thus study whether and how children in larger families were affected by the 1995 reform, examining child outcomes from early childhood to early adulthood, and across the socioeconomic spectrum. As many countries, from the US to Italy, are currently introducing or expanding child allowances, the study can provide timely policy recommendations.
Photo by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash
