Lindsey Rose Bullinger, Maithreyi Gopalan, Caitlin McPherran Lombardi
{"title":"Impacts of Publicly Funded Health Insurance for Adults on Children's Academic Achievement<sup />.","authors":"Lindsey Rose Bullinger, Maithreyi Gopalan, Caitlin McPherran Lombardi","doi":"10.1002/soej.12614","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Empirical evidence demonstrates that publicly funded adult health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has had positive effects on low-income adults. We examine whether the ACA's Medicaid expansions influenced child development and family functioning in low-income households. We use a difference-in-differences framework exploiting cross-state policy variation and focusing on children in low-income families from a nationally representative, longitudinal sample followed from kindergarten to fifth grade. The ACA Medicaid expansions improved children's reading test scores by approximately 2 percent (0.04 SD). Potential mechanisms for these effects within families are more time spent reading at home, less parental help with homework, and eating dinner together. We find no effects on children's math test scores or socioemotional skills.</p>","PeriodicalId":47946,"journal":{"name":"Southern Economic Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11156232/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Southern Economic Journal","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1002/soej.12614","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2022/12/7 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Empirical evidence demonstrates that publicly funded adult health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has had positive effects on low-income adults. We examine whether the ACA's Medicaid expansions influenced child development and family functioning in low-income households. We use a difference-in-differences framework exploiting cross-state policy variation and focusing on children in low-income families from a nationally representative, longitudinal sample followed from kindergarten to fifth grade. The ACA Medicaid expansions improved children's reading test scores by approximately 2 percent (0.04 SD). Potential mechanisms for these effects within families are more time spent reading at home, less parental help with homework, and eating dinner together. We find no effects on children's math test scores or socioemotional skills.