Bozeman Magazine

A free public lecture about poverty in the United States and the role of government programs in breaking the cycle will be hosted on Wednesday, July 10, at Montana State University.

Marianne Page, director of the Center for Poverty Research and professor of economics at the University of California Davis, will present, “Breaking the Poverty Cycle: The Role of the Safety Net,” at 7 p.m. in Linfield Hall Room 125.

As part of the MSU Initiative for Regulation and Applied Economic Analysis’ Visiting Scholar Program, Page will discuss her research focused on child poverty and intergenerational mobility in the United States and the safety net programs designed to help alleviate poverty persistence among children.

“Research suggests that we need to reframe our thinking about these programs, not just as contemporaneous poverty alleviators, but also as investments with potentially long-term payoffs,” Page said.

Approximately 21 percent of the nation’s children, including 15 percent of children in Montana, are living in poverty, said Wendy Stock, co-director of the initiative and professor of economics in the MSU Department of Agricultural Economics and Economics, housed in the colleges of Agriculture and Letters and Science.

“Finding ways to alleviate poverty over the long-term is among the most important policy issues of our time,” Stock said. “The Initiative for Regulation and Applied Economic Analysis is thrilled to be able to provide a forum for top-notch researchers, like Dr. Page, to share their findings on the impact of anti-poverty programs.”

The lecture will address ideas such as the degree to which poor children are destined to be poor as adults and whether safety net policies successfully propel children toward greater economic success as adults. Page will present her research evidence—and discuss what it takes to get good evidence—using different metrics, including health outcomes and earnings.

Page is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. She holds her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. A labor economist, she is an expert on intergenerational mobility and equality of opportunity in the United States.

Page has worked on various issues related to low-income families, U.S. safety net programs, education and gender. She has served as principle investigator on grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, with work published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and the Journal of Labor Economics.

Following the lecture, local anti-poverty leaders will lead a discussion about how safety net programs impact Montana. Panelists will include Christie Twardoski, chief of the Public Assistance Bureau within the Human and Community Services Division of the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, and Heather Grenier, CEO and president of the Human Resource Development Council in Bozeman.

The IRAEA Visiting Scholar Program brings scholars to MSU to meet with faculty and students and to give public talks to share state-of-the-art research on important regulation and policy issues. For more information about this and other IRAEA programs, visit montana.edu/regecon.