Casino-based cash transfers and fertility among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina: A time-series analysis

A Research Note on Unconditional Cash Transfers and Fertility in the United States: New Causal Evidence

As cash transfer policies have gained traction in recent years, interest in how financial resources could impact fertility has also grown. Increasing an individual's purchasing power with additional economic resources, such as those provided in unconditional cash transfers, might better enable parents to meet their fertility and reproductive goals, whether those goals are to become pregnant and give birth or to avoid or terminate pregnancies. In this research note, we provide new experimental evidence of the causal impact of a monthly unconditional cash transfer on fertility-related outcomes for U.S. families with at least one young child and low incomes. We find trends of increased pregnancy after three years but no corresponding impacts on births, miscarriages, or terminations. Our findings might indicate that modest cash transfers to mothers with low incomes in the United States are unlikely to have substantial impacts on fertility.

Intergenerational effects of a casino-funded family transfer program on educational outcomes in an American Indian community

Cash transfer policies have been widely discussed as mechanisms to curb intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic disadvantage. In this paper, we take advantage of a large casino-funded family transfer program introduced in a Southeastern American Indian Tribe to generate difference-in-difference estimates of the link between children's cash transfer exposure and third grade math and reading test scores of their offspring. Here we show greater math (0.25 standard deviation [SD], p =.0148, 95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 0.05, 0.45) and reading (0.28 SD, p = .0066, 95% CI: 0.08, 0.49) scores among American Indian students whose mother was exposed ten years longer than other American Indian students to the cash transfer during her childhood (or relative to the non-American Indian student referent group). Exploratory analyses find that a mother's decision to pursue higher education and delay fertility appears to explain some, but not all, of the relation between cash transfers and children's test scores. In this rural population, large cash transfers have the potential to reduce intergenerational cycles of poverty-related educational outcomes.