Do transitory income shocks affect infant health? I find evidence that birth weights fell following a temporary income reduction caused by an unexpected, month-long blackout in Zanzibar. Relying on 350 household surveys collected during field work, I show that the 2008 blackout reduced labor...

This paper considers the Ricardian Equivalence proposition when expectations are not rational and are instead formed using adaptive learning rules. We show that Ricardian Equivalence continues to hold provided suitable additional conditions on learning dynamics are satisfied. However, new cases...

Why are some countries mired in poverty and ill health? Can policy facilitate their transition to sustained growth and better living standards? We offer answers using a dynamic model of disease and development. Endogenous transmission of infectious disease generates non-ergodic growth where...

This paper clarifies and provides additional tests presented in the age-period-cohort analysis of nonmarital birth rates in Gray, O'Brien, Stockard, and Stone(forthcoming). Where Martin (forthcoming) has suggested specific alternative specifications or interpretations of our findings, we have...

Stated preference (SP) survey methods have been used increasingly to assess willingness to pay for a wide variety of non-market goods and services, including reductions in risks to life and health. Poorly designed SP studies are subject to a number of well-known biases, but many of these biases...

Examining committee:Michael Hibbard, chair

In a 2006 article in Demography, Jo AnnaGray Jean Stockard and Joe Stone (GSS i)observe that among black women and white women ages 20 to 39, birth rates increased sharply for unmarried women over the period 1974 to 2000. But they also increased for married women, as well, and yet the total...

Expectations play a central role in modern macroeconomic theories. The econometric learning approach models economic agents as forming expectations by estimating and updating forecasting models in real time. The learning approach provides a stability test for rational expectations and a...

We employ newly developed methods to disentangle age, period and cohort effects on nonmarital fertility ratios (NFRs) from 1972 to 2002 for black and white women aged 20-44 in the United States. We focus on three cohort factors: family structure, school enrollment, and the sex ratio. For both...