on Estimates of Poverty for Small Geographic Areas; as chair of the Panel on Evaluation of USDA’s Methodology for Estimating Eligibility and Participation for the WIC Program; the Panel on Poverty and Family Assistance; and the Panel to Evaluate Microsimulation Models for Social Welfare Programs. In 2004, he was designated a lifetime national associate of the National Academies. His research has dealt with the impact of tax and transfer programs on the economy and the distribution of income. A particular research interest is child support policy, on which he has written academic papers and consulted with numerous state governments on the development of their child support guidelines. In 2007, he was appointed to the Washington State Commission on the Review of Child Support Guidelines. He has a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

MARIANNE P. BITLER is associate professor of economics at the University of California, Irvine, and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Children’s Program and Health Economics Program. She is also a faculty affiliate in demographic and social analysis at the University of California, Irvine, a visiting scholar at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow and then an economist at the RAND Corporation, a research fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, and an economist on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve in the Division of Research and Statistics (where she worked on the Survey of Small Business Finances). Her research interests include labor economics, health economics, public economics, and applied microeconomics. Her publications include several articles on participation in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which appeared in the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Review of Agricultural Economics, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. She has a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

F. JAY BREIDT is professor and chair in the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University. Formerly, he was assistant and associate professor in the Department of Statistics and member of the Survey Section of the Statistical Laboratory at Iowa State University. This section has as major focus design and estimation for large-scale environmental surveys, particularly the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Inventory. His research interests include time series, environmental monitoring, and survey sampling. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and winner of the 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award