Home Visiting Programs and Mother and Child Outcomes: Evidence from Family Start (with Moira Wilson, Tim Maloney and Sarah Baird)

Home visiting programs where workers visit "at risk" mothers and children at home and deliver a range of service have grown in importance as a tool to ameliorate poor starts. This paper exploits the expansion of New Zealand’s Family Start, one of the earliest home visiting programs to operate at scale, to analyse the effect of the program. Using rich linked administrative data on children born from 2004-2012, our quasi-experimental analysis suggests that Family Start significantly reduced post -neonatal infant mortality, increased engagement in health care service and had a strong surveillance effect that brought more children to the early attention of child welfare services.