Working Paper

Abstract

In 2021, the Child Tax Credit (CTC) was expanded to a maximum of $3600 per year and issued monthly checks to qualified families. The first round of checks was sent out on July 15, 2021. We follow the identification strategy of Ananat et al. (2022), who compare employment changes between individuals with and without benefit-qualifying children. Instead of the average effect of all households, we focus on the households with unemployed parents and found employment-boosting effects. These results are robust under alternative identification strategies using a triple-difference method or a comparison between marginally qualifyed or underqualifyed families .  

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