Valuing Parental Time and Children’s Development in the Design of Cash Transfer Programs

When it comes to cash transfer programs like welfare for single parents and especially mothers, most of the evaluation and economic modeling efforts have focused on how those programs impact the amount of paid work single parents do. However, there has been less attention to the value of parental time and how that matters for children’s development. This podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison features Joseph Mullins, an economist at the University of Minnesota, who developed an economic model for U.S. cash transfer programs that attempts to place an accurate value on parents’ time when assessing cash transfer programs.