The causal effects of fertility are a central focus in the social sciences, but the analysis is challenged by the endogeneity of fertility choices. Earlier work has proposed several "natural experiments" from twin births or gender composition of earlier births to assess whether having more...

Intensive agriculture and deep plowing resulted in top-soil erosion and dust storms during the 1930s. These effects have been shown to affect agricultural income and land values that persisted for years. Given the growing literature on the relevance of in-utero and early-life exposures, it is...

A rich literature shows that early life conditions shape later life outcomes, including health and migration events. However, analyses of geographic disparities in mortality outcomes focus almost exclusively on contemporaneously measured geographic place (e.g., state of residence at death),...

The dismal decade of 2010-19 recorded the slowest productivity growth of any decade in U.S. history, only 1.1 percent per year in the business sector. Yet the pandemic appears to have created a resurgence in productivity growth with a 4.1 percent rate achieved in the four quarters of 2020. This...

We hypothesize that the impact of antibiotics is moderated by a population's inherent (genetic) resistance to infectious disease. Using the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937, we show that US states that are more genetically susceptible to infectious disease saw larger declines in their...

Several strands of research document the life-cycle impacts of lead exposure during the critical period of children's development. Yet little is known about long-run effects of lead exposure during early-life on old-age mortality outcomes. This study exploits the staggered installation of water...