17th Annual Paul Harper Lecture
Monthly Unconditional Cash Transfers and Children’s Development through Four Years of Age: A Randomized Controlled Trial in the U.S.
For more information, visit the event page:
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/node/321856.
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health 2025-04-16 16:15 2025-04-16 17:20 UTC use-title Location Wolfe Street Building/W2030 (Paige Hall) Zoom
Monthly Unconditional Cash Transfers and Children’s Development through Four Years of Age: A Randomized Controlled Trial in the U.S.
Developmental differences between children growing up in poverty and their higher-income peers are frequently reported. However, the extent to which such differences are caused by differences in family income is unclear. To study the causal role of income on children’s development, the Baby’s First Years randomized control trial provided families with monthly unconditional cash transfers. One thousand racially and ethnically diverse mothers with incomes below the U.S. federal poverty line were recruited from postpartum wards in 2018-19, and randomized to receive either $333/month or $20/month for the first several years of their children’s lives. In this presentation, lessons learned and the effects of the cash transfer on children and families during the first four years of the study will be summarized. To preview findings, we find select positive impacts of the cash transfer on parents’ investments in their children, but little to no impact on other measures of family wellbeing and children’s health and development. Possible explanations for these results and policy implications will be discussed.
Registration
Speaker
Katherine Magnuson
Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Katherine Magnuson is a Vilas Distinguished Professor of Social Work at the Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work and a past Director of the Institute of Research on Poverty at UW-Madison. She is a national expert on the wellbeing and development of economically disadvantaged children and their families, with specific attention to unconditional cash transfers and early childhood education. Magnuson’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Administration of Children and Families, Office of Research Planning and Evaluation), Spencer Foundation, and Heising-Simons Foundation.
The Paul Harper Lecture
PAUL A. HARPER, MD, MPH’47
Paul A. Harper was a pediatrician and early leader of academic maternal and child health (MCH) as well as an advocate and founder of the population movement. He received his medical education at Yale where he was influenced by Martha May Eliot, one of the founders of the field of maternal and child health in the United States. His academic career was interrupted by World War II where he served as an Army chief of infectious diseases working on the eradication of malaria in the South Pacific. In 1947, he completed his Masters of Public Health degree at Hopkins and was immediately appointed to be director of the Division, and later the Department of Maternal and Child Health, which he chaired until 1970. His early recognition of the challenges of rapid population growth in developing countries led to his work in East Pakistan and other parts of the world and to the creation, in 1970, of the Department of Population Dynamics here at the school. He was a great visionary, teacher and leader. His textbook, (1962) inspired the work of succeeding generations of pediatricians. His ideas and work have had a profound impact on the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
