Irma Arteaga
Dr. Arteaga is an Associate Professor at the Truman School of Public Affairs, University of Missouri. She earned a Master in Public Policy and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Minnesota. Her research seeks to understand the consequences of early childhood investments over the life course. Specifically, Dr. Arteaga examines the role of contextual factors and program dosage, intensity, and components on children’s well-being. Her research agenda has three dominant themes: analysis of the short-term effects of early childhood interventions and program delivery on children’s well-being, analysis of the long-term effects of child policy on children’s well-being, and analysis of early childhood investments in the developing world.
Dr. Arteaga works with interdisciplinary teams, conducts, and publishes research using primary data, secondary datasets, and state administrative data. She uses rigorous quantitative evaluation techniques and has extensive experience and expertise on program evaluations including longitudinal evaluations and dosage effects of early childhood preschool programs (e.g., Chicago Child-Parent Center, Missouri Head Start Programs, Mississippi Building Blocks). She has also examined the effects of the Women, Infant, and Children Program and the National School Lunch program on food insecurity and child’s cognitive outcomes during children’s transition into the school system.
Irma Arteaga recently received funding from the World Bank- SIEF’s COVID-19 emergency window program to evaluate the effects of technology on early childhood stimulation in rural Guatemala using a randomized control trial. She and her team are testing the impact of 2-minutes recorded voice messages to provide information on how caregivers can interact with children and suggest child-parent play activities. More information on this project can be found here. In September 2020, she received funding from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), at the US Department of Health and Human Services to study the effects of changes in the Child Care and Development Fund on the characteristics of children enrolled in various early care and education settings and whether there is evidence of differential impact among children from the lowest-income families or those residing in high-poverty communities and/or areas with higher percentages of Hispanic children. She is also currently the principal investigator in two projects funded by the US Department of Agriculture where she is using state administrative data from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid to examine the relationship between SNAP patterns during a child’s first year of life and various infant preventative care outcomes, as well as the effects of changes in SNAP benefit size on various outcomes. For more information about these project click here and here. Her work has been published in various journals including Science, Social Science & Medicine, Economics of Education Review, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Population Research and Policy Review, and Children and Youth Services Review, among others.
