Introduction
Children experiencing poverty are more likely to experience worse health outcomes, including injury,Previous quasi-experimental work suggests that even small increases in income may improve health trajectories for children experiencing poverty. For example, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the largest antipoverty policy in the United States prior to pandemic-related tax expansions, reduced the incidence of low birth weight infants in the population.Monetary investment and improvements in parental stress are 2 potential pathways by which we have theorized that poverty reduction may improve developmental trajectories.The present study evaluates the effect of a poverty reduction intervention on children’s health, nutrition, sleep, and health care utilization in the first 3 years of life. Such an intervention exemplifies a scalable public health approach. We hypothesized that a monthly, unconditional cash transfer would improve maternal assessments of children’s health, nutrition, and sleep, and reduce use of emergency health care.