UCLA Professor Martha Bailey’s Research on U.S. Fertility Featured in The New York Times

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A new paper by UCLA economist Martha Bailey, “The Economics of Childbearing: Trends, Progress, and Challenges,” has been featured in The New York Times. The article highlights Bailey’s analysis of how childbearing in the United States has changed over the past century, with particular attention to the distinctive patterns that have emerged since the 1960s during the so-called “second demographic transition.”
You can read the paper in the Annual Review of Economics here, and the New York Times coverage here.

Juliana Londoño Vélez awarded prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship

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We are delighted to congratulate Professor Juliana Londoño Vélez, one of the 2026 recipients of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship. These highly competitive fellowships are awarded each year to a select group of outstanding early-career scientists in the United States and Canada. Sloan Research Fellowships recognize exceptional promise in the fields of Chemistry, Computer Science, Earth and Space Science, Economics, Mathematics, Neuroscience, and Physics. Candidates are nominated by their peers, and fellows are selected by a committee of distinguished scholars in their respective disciplines.
Juliana is an applied microeconomist studying how tax and social policies can reduce poverty and inequality and promote upward mobility. Her research identifies constraints on governments’ redistributive capacity and evaluates how targeted interventions shape the life trajectories of disadvantaged populations.
She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019 and joined UCLA in 2020 as an assistant professor. She teaches undergraduate Public Economics and a graduate course in the same field.
Juliana joins nine past Sloan fellows in the UCLA Economics Department: Yotam Shem-Tov (2025), David Baqaee (2022), Natalie Bau (2022), Denis Chetverikov (2019), Pablo Fajgelbaum (2017), Jonathan Vogel (2012), Dora Costa (1999), Lee Ohanian (1998), and Andrew Atkeson (1995).
UCLA Newsroom story announcing Juliana’s Sloan Research Fellowship is available here: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/3-ucla-professors-named-sloan-research-fellows-2026.

Peilin Rao, an undergraduate student in the Economics Department, was selected for UCLA’s 2026 URC-HASS Undergraduate Research Fellows Program

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Peilin Rao, a double major in Economics and Mathematics of Computation, was selected for the competitive UCLA’s 2026 URC-HASS Undergraduate Research Fellows Program. The title of the project for his fellowship is: “A Bayesian HJB Framework for Robust Monetary Policy under Structural Uncertainty”. He will work under the supervision of UCLA Professor Randall Rojas.
Peilin has already two working papers. The first one, joint with Professor Rojas, is titled “From Prediction to Causal Interpretation: A DML Case Study in Financial Economics” and is available here. Peilin recently presented it at the NeurIPS meeting, the premier conference in machine learning and computational neuroscience. The second paper is single-authored and titled “The GNN as a Low-Pass Filter: A Spectral Perspective on Achieving Stability in Neural PDE Solvers”. Peilin presented it at the Workshop on New Perspectives in Graph Machine Learning.

Paper by UCLA Professor Martha Bailey Featured in the New York Times

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The paper “ Does Increasing Financial Access to Contraception in the U.S. Reduce Undesired Pregnancies? Evidence from the M-CARES Randomized Control Trial at Two Years” by UCLA Professor Martha Bailey and coauthors was featured in the New York Times. The paper uses a randomized controlled trial to examine how the costs of contraception affect choice of contraception method, pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth among U.S. women. The paper finds that subsidizing contraception has significant and persistent effects on the choice of contraceptive method, resulting in significantly fewer pregnancies and abortions within two years.
The paper can be found here.
The NYT article can be found here.

UCLA takes Third Place in the Fed Challenge

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UCLA’s team took third place in the annual Fed Challenge, a national competition that asks teams of undergraduate students to analyze the economy and present a monetary policy recommendation to judges from the Federal Reserve. This year, 139 schools took part in the competition, with 3 teams from each of the six regions chosen to advance to the semifinal Q&A round, and 6 finalists selected as the winners of each region. The other finalists were Pace University (first place), Harvard University (second place), University of Pennsylvania, University of Chicago, and Davidson College. UCLA’s team was composed of Blake Balak, Terrence Yu, Jiya Barman, Valentina Alencar Barros, and Loretta Lye. Professor Chris Surro and graduate student Ali Haider Ismail advised the team. Our students registered for Econ 162 (Monetary Policy) as part of their preparation for the Challenge. You can find the press release from the Fed here.