Covering Undocumented Immigrants: The Effects of a Large-Scale Prenatal Care Intervention / Sarah Miller, Laura Wherry, Gloria Aldana.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Sarah.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Wherry, Laura.

Aldana, Gloria.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w30299.

NBER working paper series no. w30299

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2022.

Summary:

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. In this paper, we examine 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, we identify siblings born to immigrant mothers before and after the policy and implement a mothers' fixed effects design to estimate policy impacts. We find 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. The effects are robust to a variety of specification checks and are larger among women who are predicted to have undocumented status at the time of the policy change and their children. Placebo tests estimate effects among immigrants and later cohorts not affected by the policy change and find no effects, as expected. Calculations based on our estimates indicate that, over the long-run, the government more than recoups the cost of its initial investment of providing Medicaid coverage to these families.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2022.