Every public policy produces consequences for beneficiaries and other members of society. For example, Social Security reduces the poverty rate among senior citizens, which in turn relieves the financial pressure on adult children to provide financial support to their aging parents. In this case, a public policy (Social Security) produces effects in line with the aspirations of its designers. Intended impacts, however, are not the sole (or even necessarily the most important) ways that public policies affect people. The most important effects—whether positive or negative—of a given policy may have been unanticipated when it was enacted. Investigating these surprising consequences and exploring their causal mechanisms are important tasks for researchers.
In our first article, Leonard M. Lopoo, Emily B. Cardon, and Kerri M. Raissian show that the impact of the dependent care provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which allows young adults to stay on their parent's policy until...
