The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 temporarily transformed the Child Tax Credit into a more generous cash benefit that was more frequently distributed to families with children in the U.S. The temporary expansion was not made permanent, and the Child Tax Credit returned to its pre-expansion structure in 2022. This introduction to a special issue volume of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, ‘The Consequences of the 2021 Child Tax Credit Expansion’, provides broad context around the expansion, elaborates on the goals for the volume, and previews the contributions from a range of experts.
Featuring Center on Poverty and Social researchers guest editors and research contributors, this special issue addresses key questions, such as: How should we understand the CTC expansion in historical and comparative context? What did the CTC expansion achieve, and what did it fail to achieve? What should future research seek to understand to offer a stronger evaluation of the costs and benefits of the CTC expansion? And what insights ought to be learned from the 2021 expansion for future considerations of a child allowance in the U.S.? In doing so, it can serve as a central source for understanding the effects of the country’s brief experiment with a near-universal child allowance and inform future policy change.
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Suggested Citation:
Curran, Megan, Hilary Hoynes, and Zachary Parolin. 2024. The consequences of the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion: An introduction to the volume. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 710, no. 1, pp. 8-18.
Published on September 04, 2024