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The America Rescue Plan (ARP) transformed the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into a more generous, inclusive monthly payment from July through December 2021. However, the expansion has been terminated and the annual CTC has been reinstated. The United States is one of the few OECD countries that do not have a child allowance system and South Korea has recently adopted child allowance in 2018. This study aims to comprehensively review the existing literature and evidence on ARP-CTC in the United States and Universal Child Allowance (CA) in Korea.

The researchers completed a database search between July 1, 2022 and July 20, 2022. For the United States, the search keywords were child tax credit OR expanded child tax credit OR CTC OR child allowance. For Korea, the search keyword was child allowance. Searches were conducted using 79 databases. A total of 36 US studies and 7 Korean studies met all the inclusion criteria and proceeded to the extraction process. A narrative thematic synthesis approach was employed to identify themes in the findings. The results were organized based on the characteristics of the studies and the post-intervention outcomes.

Studies in the United States focused primarily on economic outcomes, including poverty and material hardship, reflecting the concern policymakers and researchers have about child poverty. On the other hand, Korean studies examined employment, economic well-being, psychological well-being and expenditures in a relatively balanced share. Overall, studies found that both ARP-Child Tax Credits and Universal Child Allowance reduced child poverty and improved material hardship. Also, studies in both countries suggested that both policies had positive impacts on parental psychological well-being.

To the authors knowledge, this paper is the first to comprehensively review the impact of the US ARP-CTC in comparison with the Korean child allowance. Two studies reviewed and updated the literature on US ARP-CTC as a round-up paper. Moreover, the authors conduct cross-national comparative analyses between the United States and Korea. The contexts of the child allowance system in the two nations have both similarities and differences, thereby offering a unique opportunity for a comparative study.

Involuntary part-time employment is a measure of labor market slack that goes beyond the unemployment rate, and broadens our understanding of the state of the labor market. Our study investigates the determinants of the involuntary part-time employment share (i.e., the proportion of involuntary part-time workers in all employment) by accounting for both labor supply (unemployment) and labor demand (job vacancies). We use big data on the near universe of online job vacancies collected by Lightcast and the Current Population Survey from 2003 to 2021. We find that, within a commuting zone by Census occupation cell, a 10% increase in the unemployment rate increases the involuntary part-time share by 0.19 percentage points, while a 10% increase in job vacancies decreases the involuntary part-time share by 0.07 percentage points. We also provide suggestive evidence that higher labor market concentration, which is indicative of greater labor market power, may raise involuntary part-time employment. Overall, we conclude that higher labor supply and lower labor demand increase involuntary part-time employment.