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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 13 of the 13 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Does WIC work? The effects of WIC on pregnancy and birth outcomes

Open access
Bitler, Marianne P., Currie, Janet·2005·Journal of Policy Analysis and Management

Abstract

Support for WIC, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, is based on the belief that "WIC works." This consensus has lately been questioned by researchers who point out that most WIC research fails to properly control for selection into the program. This paper evaluates the selection problem using rich data from the national Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System. We show that relative to Medicaid mothers, all of whom are eligible for WIC, WIC participants are negatively selected on a wide array of observable dimensions, and yet WIC participation is associated with improved birth outcomes, even after controlling for observables and for a full set of state-year interactions intended to capture unobservables that vary at the state-year level. The positive impacts of WIC are larger among subsets of even more disadvantaged women, such as those who received public assistance last year, single high school dropouts, and teen mothers.

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Metadata

Authors
Bitler, M. P., & Currie, J.
Venue
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2004
Volume
24
Issue
1
Pages
73-91
ISSN
  • 0276-8739 (ISSN-L)
  • 1520-6688
OpenAlex
W2061430062
Cited by
323
References
13
FWCI
17.79
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does WIC work? The effects of WIC on pregnancy and birth outcomes. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/pam.20070
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Bitler, M. P., & Currie, J. (2005). Does WIC work? The effects of WIC on pregnancy and birth outcomes. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. https://doi.org/10.1002/pam.20070

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.