Intergenerational Socioeconomic and Health Effects of Family Support Programs”

Budget cuts are common during times of fiscal austerity, and a frequent target for spending reductions are welfare programs such as income support for poor families. Although its withdrawal has been shown to have negative shorter-run effects on poverty, education, health, and criminal activity, we often lack the data to study impacts in the longer run and across generations. However, the introduction of the New Poor Law of 1834 in England and Wales, precipitating the largest decline in welfare spending in British history, and the wealth of data available offer a unique opportunity to examine the effects of income support (“poor relief”) across multiple generations. The law centralized the administration of poor relief in these countries, dramatically restricting eligibility and reducing payments so that only the very neediest would receive them. Because each parish had previously determined the generosity of poor relief within its borders, there was wide geographic heterogeneity in how much income support declined after 1834. Therefore, we will use a difference-in-differences design to study the impact of the withdrawal of income support on a range of health and socioeconomic outcomes, including mortality, fertility, occupational skill levels, and education. By collecting novel and detailed data on parish-level poor relief spending and linking males across detailed versions of the 1861 and 1891 censuses of England and Wales, we will study the effects on individuals who were children in 1834 and on two generations of their descendants. As a preliminary validation of our project, we used coarser publicly available versions of these data and a naïve record-linking strategy to examine some outcomes of interest across these 6 decades. In the very short run, we find evidence of increased mortality in counties where poor relief declined the most between 1833 and 1834. Additionally, we show that in 1861, surviving cohorts more exposed to these declines as children were less likely to hold high-skilled jobs as adults and their children were less likely to be in school. Despite well-known biases toward statistical insignificance due to our naïve linking strategy, we nonetheless find that as adults in 1891, these male descendants had more offspring. Consistent with greater fertility being a sign of poverty due to the tradeoff between having more children and investing more in their human capital, we find that fewer of their female children – the granddaughters of those exposed to poor-relief declines as children – were in school. This proposal therefore focuses on collecting and gaining access to more detailed data and refining the record-linking strategy used in our preliminary study. Our aim is to more accurately and precisely estimate the long-run and intergenerational impacts of income support in childhood, as more convincing evidence is needed to improve our understanding of the mechanisms and critical periods shaping health and well-being across the life course and into subsequent generations. We will also help to inform policymakers about multi-generational considerations in cost-benefit analyses of welfare spending, as failing to incorporate these effects could result in long-run societal costs that greatly outweigh the short-run savings from cutting such programs. Project Number: 1R03HD117092-01A1 | Fiscal Year: 2025 | NIH Institute/Center: Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) | Principal Investigator: Jennifer Mayo | Institution: UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA, COLUMBIA, MO | Award Amount: $166,310 | Activity Code: R03 | Study Section: Population Sciences Study Section[CHHD-W] View on NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/1R03HD11709201A1