Sam Lawrence is fascinated learning about how economists study the impacts of safety net programs designed to lift people out of poverty.

In a class last year with Marianne Page, a professor of economics in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, he asked if she knew of any research opportunities. She said no at first. Then, a couple weeks later, she contacted him.

“She was, like, ‘I have something, but I don't know how much you'll like it,’” said Lawrence.

Page and Briana Ballis, an assistant professor of economics at UC Merced and a former Ph.D. student of Page’s, have been investigating whether the Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, program, a U.S. safety net program, improves children’s test scores.

Page, co-director of the Center for Poverty and Inequality Research, asked Lawrence to partner with Teo Richard, a classmate majoring in economics and statistics, on data collection for that study. Both were among the most active in the class and regulars at office hours and both wanted research experience in economics.

Page gave them a spreadsheet with nearly 1,000 phone numbers for WIC clinics in Texas. Lawrence and Richard would have to call each of them to ask when they first began to offer WIC services. The job seemed simple but would consume months of time and effort that would ultimately move the research forward.

Economic research on WIC and other safety net programs

WIC provides food aid and other forms of support for low-income pregnant women, new mothers and young children. 

From a programming standpoint, it’s helpful to know that WIC benefits reached only half of the 12.1 million people eligible for the program in 2021. However, Page and other economists have larger questions about benefits WIC and other safety net programs provide beyond the aid itself. Knowing the impacts those benefits have on people’s lives makes it possible to decide how worthwhile the program really is.

Page and Ballis have been conducting an economic analysis of whether WIC has an effect on children’s test scores. Their analysis compares children near WIC clinics to similar children in similar neighborhoods without them. Any differences in test scores are most likely created by the WIC clinic itself.

With public data from Texas covering 2005-2009, Page and Ballis have done a preliminary, unpublished analysis that found WIC did have a substantial impact on children’s test scores years later. This analysis follows an earlier published study showing that pregnant mothers who had more access to WIC gave birth to healthier babies.

Page and Ballis would be the first to find WIC clinics benefit children’s test scores. 

“Our preliminary results are consistent with what nutritionists or psychologists would expect, but it’s something that no one's been able to document before,” said Page. “That's why it's interesting.”

Their preliminary findings were promising but adding dates of when WIC services were available and expanding the scope to 1997-2024 would increase the value and accuracy of the analysis. 

However, this work couldn’t start without data on when WIC locations first opened.

Whoever answers the phone in the WIC clinic

The list of phone numbers Page originally gave Richard and Lawrence were all for WIC clinics, but WIC clinics are not necessarily government offices. For example, a church might offer WIC services. A WIC clinic might be mobile. The clinic locations are always changing.

“A clinic would close for a month and then reopen for whatever reason but in that dataset it would show up as two clinics,” said Richard.

Richard created a function with R programming to match duplicate clinics in the data. Then, for two months over the summer, Lawrence called the numbers down the list. 

He didn’t make a lot of progress. The list of phone numbers for WIC locations was not up to date and many no longer existed. Lawrence emailed the director of the Texas WIC program and a few other administrators to ask for information on when WIC locations first opened. He didn’t get it.

“They either don't know, or they couldn't give it to me,” said Lawrence. “It's kind of mind boggling to me that they wouldn't have that accessible.”

Their next idea was to get help building a web scraper that could capture contact information for every current WIC location listed on the government WIC website. One-by-one, Lawrence made the calls. 

This time, he found a different problem: Many didn’t know when the services began.

“Even when we spoke to managers, they very often wouldn’t know,” said Lawrence. “I think it's just because they don't directly have access to those records.”

Finding a better dataset

Last summer, Ballis got access to the White Pages business directories from 1997 to 2024. Because a new directory comes out each year, the year a business first appears in the directory is also likely to be the first year they offered WIC services.

Lawrence identified WIC providers and their first directory appearance one-by-one and manually copied their contact information into a spreadsheet. He referenced every phone directory and compared it with a collection of Texas WIC annual reports Ballis found.

“It's still way trickier than it sounds,” said Page, “because sometimes there are two clinics in the same location but sometimes the name is the same but it's in a slightly different location. Sometimes it disappears.”

Lawrence spent last summer confirming this information by phone and email, but progress was incredibly slow. Sometimes he would get multiple locations in a day answering his emails while other times it could take weeks for a response.

“It took me a large part of the summer,” said Lawrence, “but at least it was consistent, and I was able to know exactly what my deliverables were.”

Next steps in research 

Right now, Page and Ballis are still waiting to receive detailed administrative data from the State of Texas. Their preliminary analysis using kids’ test scores was based on the assumption that they were born in the same zip code as they lived when they took their exams. However, by that point in their lives their families may have moved from somewhere else and not had access to WIC.

“I think [Lawrence and Richard] are getting an appreciation for how research is actually done,” said Page. “And hopefully getting their hands dirty with finding these data gives them some healthy skepticism of the research papers they read later on.”

Lawrence plans to pursue a pre-doctoral position in economics when he graduates and hopes to continue in academia.

“I think that having more research to better support comprehensive welfare programs is going to be really important going forward especially as you know more and more people are basically marginalized from the labor market,” said Lawrence.

Richard is also considering graduate school for economics and said that this exposure to research has been valuable. 

“This WIC project is just interesting in itself because I'm interested in policy, especially how to bring people up out of poverty in a practical way,” said Richard. “It's cool to see how these big projects get done.”