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The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has been in effect since the 1970s. In this project, I use two identification strategies to estimate the average causal intend-to-treat effects of the WIC program on children’s longer-term outcomes such as high school graduation, college enrollment and completion, and earnings. The first identification strategy exploits variation across counties and over time from WIC geographical roll-out in the 1970s. The second identification strategy uses a regression discontinuity design based on county priority rankings for WIC funding obtained from unique archival records from the state of Texas and extrapolated for all other states using Texas officials’ methodology. I match adult outcomes of individuals in the American Community Survey and Decennial Census 2000 born in the 1970s with their place of birth information in the Social Security Administration's Numident File. My preliminary findings from the first identification strategy (historical roll-out of WIC) used on each of the two samples (ACS and Census) separately are strikingly similar and indicate that exposure to WIC in-utero raises, on average, the probability of graduating from high school and enrolling in college, with the biggest effects for white males. The results from the second identification strategy (RD) are not yet available. Next, I explore whether the effects for whites are driven by complementarity between nutritional and educational interventions and the low quality of schooling for blacks at the time. For this purpose, I study, for the first time in this literature, the dynamic complementarity effects of WIC, a large-scale nutritional public program, with several large-scale educational public interventions, particularly Head Start and court-mandated state-level school quality reforms (results not yet available). Finally, I zoom in on the outcomes of individuals who were most likely eligible for WIC at birth by linking adults in Census 2000 and ACS with their mothers in CPS and SIPP.
Presenter(s)
Anna Malinovskaya, Cornell University
Long Term Own and Dynamic Complementarity Effects of the WIC Program
Category
Volunteer Session Abstract Submission
Description
Session: [002] HEALTH AND INFORMATION
Date: 4/11/2023
Time: 8:30 AM to 10:15 AM
Date: 4/11/2023
Time: 8:30 AM to 10:15 AM