Hilary Hoynes of the University of California, Berkeley, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University and Douglas Almond of Columbia University have found<br />that low-income children who benefited from the program were healthier and more likely to be working decades later than otherwise similar children in counties where the program arrived later.<br />But the emerging body of evidence on the supply-side benefits of certain programs does mean<br />that the specific structure of a given program matter, and policy makers shouldn’t take for granted that the trade-offs around the social safety net always point in the same direction.<br />Receiving unemployment insurance, for example, appears to make people slower to find new work, and the Congressional Budget Office projects<br />that the Affordable Care Act will lead to fewer adults working because they can more easily obtain health care without having an employer.<br />The clearest example of a program that appears to increase labor supply<br />and hence the United States’ economic potential is the earned-income tax credit (E. I.T.<br />“But maybe we will, as that body of evidence develops.”<br />The United States and other advanced nations are struggling to emerge from a pattern of persistently low growth, an<br />era when many prime-age people aren’t in the labor force at all and productivity gains have been weak for years.<br />It’s a pretty straightforward equation that when government intervention makes child care services cheaper<br />than they would otherwise be, people who might otherwise stay home raising their children instead work.<br />But also important is that a variety of social welfare programs introduced<br />and expanded since the 1960s have now been around long enough, often with periodic changes to their structure, to allow for an analysis of their long-term effects.
