The Impact of the WIC Program on Pregnancy, Infant, and Child Outcomes

Marianne Bitler, RAND
Janet Currie, University of California, Los Angeles

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, infants and Children (the WIC program) provides direct nutritional supplements and nutritional advice to pregnant, postpartum and lactating women, infants and children who are income eligible and are deemed to be nutritionally-at-risk. Numerous studies have concluded that the WIC program is beneficial for infants.However, these studies have been criticized for failing to control adequately for unobserved characteristics of mothers that might explain both WIC participation and better birth outcomes.Using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we investigate whether previous findings about the effect of WIC on infant and pregnancy outcomes hold in more recent data. We also extend the fairly limited existing literature on children's outcomes. We use both a fixed-effects and an instrumental-variables strategy to correct our estimates for possible positive selection into the WIC program.