In the United States and Britain, there is a "family gap" between the wages of mothers and other women. Differential returns to marital and parental status explain 40%–50% of the gender gap. Another 30%–40% is explained by women's lower levels of work experience and lower returns to experience. Taking advantage of "quasi experiments" in job‐protected maternity leave in the United States and Britain, this article finds that women who had leave coverage and returned to work after childbirth received a wage premium that offset the negative wage effects of children.

We examine how child maltreatment—including neglect, physical and sexual abuse, and other forms of maltreatment—is affected by parental economic circumstances. Using state‐level panel data on cases of maltreatment and numbers of children in foster care, we find that increases in the fractions of children with absent fathers and working mothers in a state are related to increases in many measures of maltreatment, as are increases in the share of families with two nonworking parents and those with incomes below 75% of the poverty line. Decreases in state welfare benefit levels are associated with increases in foster care placement.

A child's welfare is affected not only by the wealth of her parents, but also by the quality of care her parents provide. Physical abuse, neglect, and other forms of child maltreatment impose severe hardships on children and may adversely affect them as adults (Cathy Widom, 1989). We examine whether child maltreatment is affected by the socioeconomic circumstances of parents. Our hypothesis is that children are more likely to be maltreated if their parents have fewer resources. We use a broad conception of "resources." It encompasses not only income, but also parental time and the quality of parental time. For example, a low-income working single mother may be short on resources needed to parent not only because she earns a low income, but also because she may not have the physical or emotional reserves to care for her children properly at the end of the day. Likewise, an unemployed father may provide less than adequate parenting not only because his income has been reduced, but also because of the depression and loss of self-esteem that may accompany unemployment (Arthur Goldsniith et al., 1996). We use state-level panel data to analyze the impact that socioeconomic circumstances (in particular, parental work status and single parenthood) have on the incidence of child maltreatment. We find that socioeconomic circumstances do matter. States with higher fractions of children with absent fathers, and especially absent fathers and working mothers, have higher rates of child maltreatment. Nonworking fathers are also associated with higher rates of maltreatment.

We examine peer effects in early education by estimating value-added models with school fixed effects that control extensively for individual, family, peer, and teacher characteristics to account for the endogeneity of peer group formation. We find statistically significant and robust spillover effects from preschool on math and reading outcomes, but statistically insignificant effects on various behavioral and social outcomes. We also find that peer externalizing problems, which most likely capture classroom disturbance, hinder cognitive outcomes. Our estimates imply that ignoring spillover effects significantly understates the social returns to preschool.