Martha J. Bailey

How Johnson Fought the War on Poverty: The Economics and Politics of Funding at the Office of Economic Opportunity.

This article presents a quantitative analysis of the geographic distribution of spending through the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). Using newly assembled state- and county-level data, the results show that the Johnson administration directed funding in ways consistent with the War on Povertys rhetoric of fighting poverty and racial discrimination: poorer areas and those with a greater share of nonwhite residents received systematically more funding. In contrast to New Deal spending, political variables explain very little of the variation in EOA funding. The smaller role of politics may help explain the strong backlash against the War on Povertys programs.

More Power to the Pill: The Impact of Contraceptive Freedom on Women's Labor-Force Participation

The release of Enovid in 1960, the first birth control pill, afforded U.S. women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers, yet little is known about the impact of the pill on womens labor-force participation. This paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of oral contraception on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of womens market work. Using compiled legal data and the Current Population Surveys, my results suggest that early legal access to the pill significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22. Among women in their twenties, early access increased the number of women in the paid market as well as the number of annual hours and weeks worked. The results suggest that birth control may have accelerated the growth in younger womens labor-force participation in the U.S. after 1970.

Does Family Planning Increase Children’s Opportunities? Evidence from the War on Poverty and the Early Years of Title X

This paper examines the relationship between parents’ access to family planning and the economic resources of their children. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.8% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 12% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. A bounding exercise suggests that the direct effects of family planning programs on parents’ resources account for roughly two thirds of these gains.

Hope for America's next generation

The gap in survival rates for children in the richest and poorest U.S. communities has shrunk A deluge of recent studies has shown that poorer communities suffer worse health outcomes. Among low-income Americans, life expectancy at age 40 in the poorest areas of the U.S. is 4.5 years lower than in the highest-income areas (1). In 2010, infant mortality rates in the poorest U.S. communities were over 70% higher than those in the most affluent ones [see tables S3 and S4 in (2)]. On page 708 of this issue, Currie and Schwandt paint a more complicated but encouraging picture (2). They show that, despite rising inequality in almost every dimension of American life, the child mortality gap between the poorest and the richest counties has shrunk in recent decades.

Women's Economic Advancement in the Twentieth-Century United States

The integration of women into formal labor markets was one of the most salient changes of the twentieth century. The “female century,” in the words of The Economist , witnessed an extraordinary transformation of womens opportunities and outcomes both in and outside the household. My dissertation explores both the causes and the consequences of womens move from home to market in the United States during three episodes of rapid change. It begins by documenting demand-side shifts during the 1940s that increased the earnings and occupational choices of African-American women; then demonstrates the impact of contraceptive technology on the extent and intensity of womens participation in the formal labor market after 1960; and, finally, estimates the consequences of shifts in womens labor supply for the growth of earnings inequality in the United States during the 1980s.