The War on Poverty Project

Evaluating the lasting, economic effects of the War on Poverty

Research

Is the Social Safety Net a Long-Term Investment? Large-Scale Evidence from the Food Stamps Program
(Martha J. Bailey, Hilary Hoynes, Maya Rossin-Slater, and Reed Walker, 2023 Review of Economic Studies）

‘Prep School for Poor Kids’: The Long-Run Impact of Head Start on Human Capital and Productivity
(Martha Bailey, Shuqiao Sun, and Brenden Timpe, 2021 American Economic Review 111(12):3963:4001)

See write up in the April 2021 NBER Digest, May 2021 in the Anderson Review, and June 2021 in Vox
NBER Working Paper, HCEO Working Paper
Online Appendix

Changes in the U.S. Gender Gap in Wages in the 1960s
(Martha J. Bailey, Thomas Helgerman, and Bryan Stuart, 2021 American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 111:143-48)

HCEO featured this paper in a research spotlight; the Center for Poverty Research featured it in a Policy Brief; and London School of Economics blogged about it.
Cited in The Atlantic and Nature and discussed in an interview with Mic.

Executive summary here; appendices here; Read our blog in the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Appendices available here: Data and Analysis. PMCID: PMC4266933
Winner of the 2014 Arthur H. Cole Prize for the best article published in the Journal of Economic History from July 2013-June 2014.

Legacies of the War on Poverty (chapter 1)
(coedited by Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger). (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013).

Read Martha Bailey’s piece in Room for Debate in the New York Times and Op Ed in the Huffington Post.
Cited by The Nation, the New York Times, Media Matters, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Education Week’s Timeline: The War on Poverty, CNN, and New Republic. Discussed on NPR’s Tell Me More.
An Op Ed by Martha Bailey’s co-editor, Sheldon Danziger, appeared in the New York Times.
Reviewed in Journal of Economic Literature (on pages 126-27) and on the New York Review of Books (Part I and Part II).