Marianne P. Bitler

Education

• Ph.D. in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1998
• B.S., Mathematics, The Pennsylvania State University, 1991 (with Honors)

About

Marianne Bitler has expertise in public economics, as well as in labor economics, health economics and applied microeconomics. Before coming to UC Davis, she was a professor of economics at UC Irvine. She has also worked at the Public Policy Institute of California, the RAND Corporation, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Trade Commission. She is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at IZA. She is currently a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources. She is a member of the AEA's Committee on the Status of the LGBTQ+ Individuals in the Economics Profession.

Research Focus

Professor Bitler's research focuses on the effects of government safety net programs on disadvantaged groups, economic demography, health economics, public economics, and the economics of education.

Publications

• Bitler, M., Currie, J., Hoynes, H., Ruffini, K., Schulkind, L., and Willage, B. (2023). Mothers as insurance: Family spillovers in WIC. Journal of Health Economics 91: 102784.
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• Bitler, M., Hoynes, H., and Schanzenbach, D. The Social Safety Net in the Wake of COVID-19. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Summer 2020 Special Edition on COVID-19 and the Economy, part 1. 119-145.
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• Bitler, M., Hoynes, H., and Kuka, E. (2017.) Do In Work Benefits Serve as a Safety Net? Journal of Human Resources 52:2, 319-350.
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• Bitler, M., & Carpenter, C. (2016.) Health insurance mandates, mammography, and breast cancer diagnoses. AEJ: Economic Policy 8:3, 39-68.
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• Bitler, M., & Hoynes, H. (2016). The more things change, the more they stay the same? The safety net and poverty in the great recession. Journal of Labor Economics 34:S1, S403-S444,
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• Bitler, M., & L. Schmidt. (2012). Utilization of infertility treatments: The effects of insurance mandates. Demography, 49(1), 124–149.
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• Bitler, M., & S. Haider. (2011). Policy retrospectives: An economic view of food deserts in the United States. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 30(1), 153–176.
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• Bitler, M., J. Gelbach, & H. Hoynes. (2006). What mean impacts miss: Distributional effects of welfare reform experiments. American Economic Review, 96(4), 988–2012.

Teaching

Marianne Bitler currently teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in public economics. In the past, she has taught undergraduate health economics and graduate and undergraduate applied econometrics.

Awards

• Brattle Award — Distinguished Paper Prize for the Best Corporate Finance Paper in the Journal of Finance, for Testing Agency Theory with Entrepreneur Effort and Wealth (joint with T. Markowitz and A. Vissing-Jorgensen), 2005
• Food Safety and Nutrition Section of the American Association of Agricultural Economics' Prize for Best Economics Paper in the Field of Food Safety and Nutrition in (for "Does WIC Work? The Effects of WIC on Pregnancy and Birth Outcomes" —joint with Janet Currie), 2005