Lacey, L. (2023) The physical and mental health returns of Head Start 25 years after participation: evidence from income eligibility cutoffs. Economic Inquiry, 1– 21. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/ecin.13148
Can destigmatizing mental health increase willingness to seek help? Experimental evidence from Nepal
Lacey, L., Mishra, N., Mukherjee, P., Prakash, N., Prakash, N., Quinn, D., Sabarwal, S., & Saraswat, D. (2025). Can destigmatizing mental health increase willingness to seek help? Experimental evidence from Nepal. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 44, 97–124. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.22643
Cash Assistance for Allegheny Young Adults: Impacts and Implications
In the summer of 2023, DHS launched a direct cash support program called Cash Assistance for Allegheny Young Adults (CAAYA), which provided a one-time payment of $4,000 to young adults, ages 18 through 22, with a history in the child welfare system, who were experiencing homelessness or were young parents who had an open case with Allegheny County’s child welfare office. In this report, we present a mixed-methods approach to evaluating the impact of CAAYA, including longitudinal surveying, a quasi-experimental analysis of administrative data in the Allegheny County Data Warehouse, and semi-structured interviews with cash recipients.
Children of Incarcerated Parents
This data brief presents information on the service involvement, holding status, and child welfare outcomes for incarcerated parents and their children from January 2018 through December 2021. It is an update of a previous 2008 report that examined the needs of children with incarcerated parents to help identify ways to best support them.
With Katherine Rittenhouse and David Simon
Over one third of children in the U.S. are investigated by the child protection system (CPS) by age 18, but the effects of this interaction on families and children are largely unknown. Investigations aim to protect children from harm and direct services to families in need. However, they also bring the implicit threat of child removal, which can generate both stress and institutional distrust among affected families. Using a regression discontinuity design, we study the impacts of these interactions on child health. Children who are just above the threshold for being “defaulted” into an investigation see a reduction in injuries and an increase in preventative care in the two months following the referral. Effects are consistent across child gender, race and age. An exploration of mechanisms suggests that it is the investigation, rather than home removal, which improve child health.
With Christophe Combemale, Tamar Oostrom, and Alexei Alexandrov
We examine how Medicaid reimbursement rates affect mental health access and use. Allegheny County provides behavioral health services for Medicaid recipients in collaboration with a managed care organization that sets and frequently changes provider and service-specific rates. We find that increasing Medicaid payments for mental health services increases the quantity of services provided, with an elasticity of around 0.16. This corresponds to the average increase in rates (20%) leading to a 3.2% increase in services. Payments mostly increase the number of services rendered for pre-existing patients, with a small increase in the number of unique patients, and are more effective for the largest providers.
The Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Impact of Early Childhood Development Intervention: Evidence from Nepal
with Nathan Fiala, Nishith Prakash, Deepak Saraswat, and Shwetlena Sabarwal
Early childhood development (ECD) deficits affect approximately 200 million children under age five in developing countries, impacting their physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional outcomes. However, access to early childhood education programs and their optimal implementation remains constrained in these countries. Using a randomized control trial in 201 schools in Nepal, this study evaluates the impact of teacher training on caregivers’ knowledge of ECD practices and children’s key developmental outcomes. Despite Nepal’s constitutional commitment to early childhood development, previous research reveals critical gaps in educator knowledge of ECD practices. These implementation challenges make Nepal an ideal setting to evaluate program interventions. The intervention in this study has two components: a) training teachers to implement ECD best practices, and b) enabling teachers to deliver a six-month educational program for primary caregivers covering stimulation, hygiene, nutrition, and disability. Additionally, our research design evaluates the impact of relaxing teachers’ time constraints by randomly allocating supplemental staff support. The support staff are allocated to help the teachers in the classroom or conduct the information sessions with the primary caregivers, outside the classroom. Preliminary results reveal that implementing the teacher training program resulted in improvements in children’s ASQ scores (scores from Ages and Stages Questionnaire) and the caregivers’ Practice of Early Stimulation and Learning (PESL) index. The improvements are sizeable and range from 0.10 to 0.15 of a standard deviation. In our attempts to further unpack the overall impact, we document key heterogeneities related to the impact of additional support staff and the impacts of various interventions on different age groups of the children in our study. Our main results and underlying heterogeneity align with the existing literature on early childhood development and help highlight priority areas for policy intervention.