Covering the Undocumented: The Effects of A Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention

As part of the SBS Speaker Series, join Dr. Laura Wherry, Associate Professor of Economics and Public Service at NYU Wagner, for a talk on prenatal care intervention. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. Dr. Wherry examines the short- and long-term effects of a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented immigrants using a novel dataset that links California birth records to Census surveys and administrative records on mortality, earnings, educational attainment, and public program participation.

 

Using these records, she identified siblings born to immigrant mothers before and after the policy. Implementing a mothers' fixed effects design, she found that the policy increased coverage for and use of prenatal care among pregnant immigrant women, and increased average gestation length and birth weight among their children. Later in life, these children experience better educational outcomes, are less likely to have children at young ages, and receive fewer public supports.