Funded research

Martha Bailey, Robert Wood Johnson Fellow in Health Policy, Department of Economics, University of Michigan, and Nzinga Broussard, Department of Economics, University of Michigan.

The Impact of Family Planning Programs on the Poverty of U.S. Women and Children, 1960-1980

Abstract

Family planning has been a component of the United States' anti-poverty programs since the 1960s. Yet over forty years later, there are few credible estimates of how dramatic increases in resources for family planning during the 1960s and 1970s affected the longer-term well-being of women and children or the persistence of poverty in the United States.

This project seeks to quantify the impact of U.S. family planning programs by (1) bringing together the largest and most comprehensive panel dataset on public and non-profit family planning programs for the early years of these programs (1964-1980); (2) matching this information with other publicly-available and restricted data; and (3) employing new research methodologies to account for the potential endogeneity of clinic location and funding levels. The initial focus of the project will be on quantifying the average impact of county-level family planning programs on women's birth and health outcomes as well as the distribution of these effects across racial and economic groups. Our longer-term research objective is to examine the importance of federal and state family planning policy for a variety of outcomes including infant health, child education and women's education and labor market outcomes.

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