One of our newest faculty members, Martha Bailey, is hitting the ground running at UCLA with the funding of two new research proposals.

The first is for the project, “Measuring Intergenerational Mobility in the US over the 20^th Century,” funded by the Center for Equitable Growth and the Russell Sage Foundation.  The project aims to quantify national rates of intergenerational mobility in terms of occupation, income and education for the early 20^th Century using Social Security Administration SS5 data that includes all states as well as women and men (because the records contain women’s married and birth names).  The project uses machine learning to generate large enough samples to allow the researchers to correlate early 20^th century policies and area characteristics with geographic variation in intergenerational mobility, similar to Chetty et al.’s Opportunity Atlas for the modern period.

In addition, M-CARES, a randomized control trial evaluating the role of out-of-pocket costs on women’s choice of contraceptive method, has been funded by the National Institutes of Health. M-CARES aims to evaluate the role of the price of contraceptives in women’s choice of contraceptive method, unintended pregnancy, and her life outcomes.  The NIH allows the researchers to recruit a larger sample to study how unintended pregnancy affects the lives of older children, including their health, educational achievement, and wages.

Congratulations, Martha!