2026 Theses Doctoral

Three Essays on Income Support Policy, Family Economic Status, and Health

Pulliam, Christopher L.

This dissertation examines how universal cash transfers affect food hardship, and how the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) affects health and wealth accumulation over the long term.

While an old idea, universal cash transfers have regained interest among the public, policymakers, and social scientists as a means to improve health and economic outcomes. Yet, we know little about how this policy implemented at scale may affect food hardship. While recent work examines the effects of unconditional cash through field experiments, these studies find mixed results. However, treatment groups are small relative to the population at large; therefore, it is unclear if findings would apply at scale. In Chapter 1, I fill this gap in the literature by leveraging annual variation in the disbursement date of the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD)—a yearly cash payment for which nearly all Alaskans are eligible—using a synthetic difference-in-differences estimator. Given the lack of appropriate survey data, I use Google Trends data on weekly search intensity for terms plausibly related to food hardship as a proxy measure. My preferred estimates show that PFD disbursement reduces food hardship by 39 percent of a standard deviation over five weeks. Event-study estimates suggest that effects are initially large and then substantially fade within one month. Results are robust to a variety of specification checks and placebo tests. My findings are entirely concentrated in years outside of the COVID period, which may help explain why several recent unconditional cash experiments find little impact on food insecurity and related outcomes.

In Chapter 2, I test if income-support policies can improve health across multiple generations. While several studies have examined the multigenerational impacts of health and education programs, we know far less about cash benefits. The answer to this question informs longstanding debates on the efficacy of cash transfers and improves our understanding of inequality and the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic disadvantage. Using panel data spanning three generations, I leverage four decades of variation in generosity of the EITC across time, states, and family sizes to test whether mothers’ EITC exposure in childhood affects the health of their offspring at birth. Estimates suggest that a $100 increase in mother’s average annual childhood EITC exposure reduces the prevalence of low birth weight by three tenths of a percentage point or about four percent relative to the sample mean. Results are concentrated among infants born to mothers from disadvantaged families, defined either by the family head’s years of education or family income. Heterogeneity analyses further suggest that Black infants and male infants experience the largest health benefits. In terms of mechanisms, I find little evidence for changes in fertility or family formation; instead, I show increases in mothers’ adult economic security prior to childbirth. In total, my results imply that income-support policies in childhood can have substantial multigenerational health spillovers.

In Chapter 3, I use plausibly exogenous variation in the maximum EITC benefit amount to investigate the effects of childhood EITC exposure on wealth accumulation in young adulthood. Estimates from my preferred specification suggest that an additional $100 in average annual childhood EITC exposure increases the value of annuities and individual retirement accounts, liquid assets, and stocks by about three percent each. However, these gains are offset by a four percent increase in student loan debt, resulting in no detectable gains to net worth. This pattern of results is more pronounced among children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and I find net worth gains of 10 to 20 percent among individuals who grew up in low-to-moderate-income families. Overall, my findings are consistent with previous work documenting the positive employment and education effects of childhood EITC exposure. Increased earnings yield higher savings while additional schooling comes with higher student loan debt.