Marianne Page, University of California, Davies

Sources of Generational Persistence in Education and Income

Abstract

In this paper, we find that the benefits of a low-cost early-life health intervention transfer from one generation to the next. Importantly, we show that there are only significant education and income spillovers if the mothers were exposed. We provide novel evidence that improved marriage outcomes of mothers, but not fathers, are an important source of the estimated intergenerational spillovers. Moreover, we document that the early-life healthcare policy significantly increased inter-generational mobility across three generations making it a key candidate to contribute to reducing cycles of poverty.

Marianne Page is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis, with expertise in labor economics and public economics. In addition to her position in the Department of Economics, she is the Director of the Center for Poverty Research at UC Davis, a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a research fellow at IZA. She currently serves as co-editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

Professor Page’s research focuses on economic mobility in the United States. She investigates how families, the economy, and social policies affect children’s likelihood of achieving economic success in adulthood. Her recent research investigates multigenerational persistence in the effects of safety net programs. She has served as principle investigator on grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

You can read more about Marianne Page here

CEBI host: Miriam Wüst