Marianne Page Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Center for Poverty & Inequality
Marianne Page is a Professor of Economics and
Co-Director of the Center for Poverty & Inequality Research
at UC Davis. She has authored numerous scholarly articles
focusing on low-income families. A labor economist, she is
an expert on intergenerational mobility and equality of
opportunity in the United States. She has also published on
issues related to the U.S. safety net, education, and
gender. Her research has appeared in the Quarterly
Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal:
Economic Policy, and the Journal of Labor Economics, and has
been funded by the National Science Foundation, National
Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation.
Current projects include evaluations of the long-term and
multi-generational effects of early life access to health and
nutrition programs, and the effects of cash transfers on
children’s well-being.
Professor Page is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of
Economic Research, and a Research Fellow with the Institute for
the Study of Labor. She currently serves on Governor
Newsom’s Council of Economic Advisors. She is a Co-Editor
for the Journal of Human Resources. Previously, she
served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Policy
Analysis and Management, and Education, Finance and Policy.
She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of
San Francisco, and a member of the Board of Overseers for the
Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
Professor Page received a PhD in economics from the University of
Michigan in 1995, and an undergraduate degree in economics from
the University of Washington in 1987.
1138 Social Sciences & Humanities Building
Davis, CA
Facilitated by Courtney Lyles and Marianne Page, this event
features short presentations by guest speakers followed by an
interactive Q+A. All UC Davis faculty, students and staff are
encouraged to register for the symposium. Light refreshments will
be provided for those who attend in-person.
ROCKY Hill, Conn.—Some of the country’s savviest economic trend
predictors spend all day answering call-center phones.
Operators at 211 emergency helplines raised alarm bells about
a baby formula shortage ahead of the headlines about
empty shelves. And they knew that families were defaulting on
their mortgages before the subprime collapse in
2008.
Cantadora Wines created a line of wines dedicated to women
contributing in exceptional ways. CPIR Director, Marianne Page,
is featured on “The
Sage.“
10% of the sales of each the wines produced go back the
organizations founded by the women featured on the bottles. The
stories of the women are an inspiration and the work they do
foundational to the health and prosperity of women and children
in our community.
December 2, 2022 – Three CPIR research affiliates have been featured in a new article in the ‘Ask the Expert’ series published by the UC Davis Office of Research.
As debate continues over how to complete the Affordable
Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, it’s important to remember the
crucial role Medicaid plays in births in our country. Medicaid
covers 4 in 10 births, and there’s a renewed push
to expand Medicaid coverage for new moms. There’s also
growing research showing that for kids, the benefits of Medicaid
coverage persist well into adulthood, in the form of better
health and higher earnings.
How you survive the coronavirus crisis may depend on your ZIP
code. Even before the Bay Area shuttered schools and parks,
businesses and restaurants, the region was known for its vast
economic divides.
With the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating in March,Congress
scrambled to design a more than $2 trillion economic package that
would prop up private companies, keep the financial system
liquid, and, at the same time, provide financial help to
individuals whose income was evaporating as the result of states
issuing stay-at-home orders and temporarily shuttering
nonessential businesses.
SACRAMENTO — Continuing his commitment to strengthen,
innovate and grow California’s economy, Governor Gavin Newsom
today announced the creation of his Council of Economic Advisors.
The Council will advise the Governor and Director of the
California Department of Finance Keely Martin Bosler on
wide-ranging economic issues and deepen relationships between the
Administration and academic researchers to keep California moving
toward an economy that is inclusive, resilient, and sustainable.
Center for Poverty Research Director Marianne Page and
Faculty Affiliate Ross Thompson were invited to speak on a panel
at the Childhood Obesity Conference in Anaheim, CA
July 15-18. Their session entitled “Poverty: Obesity
Prevention’s Top Priority?” discussed how childhood obesity is
tied to so many other issues—poverty, family supports, and
healthy communities.
Marianne Page, professor of economics at UC Davis, will lead a
team of experts from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, UC
Santa Barbara and UCSF to shift from fragmented,
discipline-specific approaches of studying childhood disparities
to a multidisciplinary, comprehensive examination of the issue.
The project goal is to understand how health and nutrition
programs affect the health and development of disadvantaged
children, as well as build relationships with policymakers.
Center for Poverty Research (CPR) Director Marianne Page and
Faculty Affiliate Marianne Bitler will present their research
this month at the Institute
for Researchon
Poverty’s (IRP) annual summer research workshop.
Each June the workshop brings together poverty
scholars at all stages in their careers to present their research
on low-income populations.
New research suggests programs aimed at helping low-income U.S.
children, such as Head Start early childhood education and
Medicaid health coverage, may have benefits not only for
participating children but for their children as well.
On September 12, 2017 the Census Bureau released the
official poverty rate for 2016 (12.7%), showing that 40.6
million Americans live below the federal poverty line
(FPL), currently set at $24,563 for a family of four. This
poverty measure is an estimate of the annual income required to
meet basic needs.
Poor children in the United States are less healthy than other
children, which may be a central factor in why poverty persists
across generations. Research approaches that use variation in
public programs let researchers disentangle the effects of a
program itself from other factors. These approaches confirm the
broad benefits of safety net programs that target children’s
health and nutrition. They also suggest that access to these
programs in early life improves children’s economic well-being as
adults, which likely transmits to the next generation.
The idea that individuals can escape poverty through hard work is
a fundamental tenant of American society. Intergenerational
mobility is lower in the United States than in any other
developed country in the world. One in ten American children
spends at least half of their childhood in poverty. Understanding
the mechanisms that lie behind the intergenerational transmission
of poverty is necessary in order to design effective policies to
improve poor children’s life chances.
The Census Bureau’s latest poverty statistics show that last year
13.5 percent of Americans still lived below the federal poverty
line. The official poverty rate is a valuable measure of how
well we as a nation ensure opportunity for those who earn the
least. However, just as important is understanding why the
poverty rate has not changed, how it affects those who are poor
and what policies can make a difference.
This presentation by UC Davis economist Marianne Page describes
the mechanisms that lie behind the intergenerational transmission
of poverty, the understanding of which is necessary in order to
design effective policies to improve poor children’s life
chances.
The goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the United
States is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low
income families. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for
Women, Infants and Children (WIC) provides federal grants to
states to support nutrition for pregnant and post-partum mothers
and children up to age five. Our study, one of the first to
convincingly describe the program’s causal effect, found that
WIC’s implementation led to an increase in average birthweight,
especially among mothers with low levels of education. This
suggests that the value of WIC benefits for needy participants is
substantial compared to the program’s relatively low costs.
DAVIS, Calif. — In this new video series released by the UC
Davis Center for Poverty Research, Faculty Affiliates discuss
some of the causes and consequences of poverty in the U.S. as
well as possible solutions suggested by research from across
academic disciplines.
In this video, economist Marianne Page talks about how increasing
academic achievement among children in poverty can help them to
achieve their potential.
In recent years, UC Davis, with the support of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, has taken on a crucial
role in the fight against domestic poverty.
In this podcast, visiting scholar Ariel Kalil discusses her
research on child development with UC Davis Professor of
Economics and Center for Poverty Research Deputy Director
Marianne Page.
DAVIS, Calif. — In his novel The Grapes of Wrath, John
Steinbeck made famous the image of poor farming families fleeing
a land that turned against them to seek better lives in
California. Drought, regular economic shocks and persistent rural
poverty nationwide are just a few reasons the rural poor that
Steinbeck portrayed continue to struggle today.
Over the past 45 years, the United States has experienced a
rising standard of living, with real GDP per capita more than
doubling between 1959 and 2004. In contrast, living standards
among some groups seem to have stagnated. Although a number of
studies have documented a correlation between macroeconomic
conditions and poverty, the relationship is not as simple, or as
strong, as one might think. What additional factors can explain
the starkly different trends in economic well-being that are
measured by overall GDP growth and the poverty rate?
Jan. 8 marks the 50th anniversary of legislation launching
America’s War on Poverty. The story of that war is often told
with a sort of reverse Hollywood ending: oversimplified and
wrapped up neatly as a failure. No one can claim that the war on
poverty has been won, but the failure narrative is just as wrong.
The real story with some fundamental facts highlighted is more
complex than simple wins and losses, and long overdue.
These three projects won more than $1.3 million in the funding
this past June to support interdisciplinary research projects led
by Center for Poverty Research director Ann Huff Stevens, deputy
director Marianne Page, and faculty affiliate Giovanni Peri.
Smaller classes help students, many argue, especially those most
“at risk.” Research shows that on average this is true. However,
when “risk” is defined beyond ethnicity or socioeconomic status,
the picture of who most benefits becomes less clear.
A large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the
Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) has
accomplished the goal of improving nutritional well-being and
health of low income families, but most studies have been based
on research designs that compare program participants to
non-participants. If selection into these programs is non-random,
then such comparisons will lead to biased estimates of the
program’s true effects. In this study, investigators use the
rollout of the WIC program across counties to estimate the impact
of the program on infant health.
