Money parents give their adult children may be important for the financing of a child's education or a first home, relaxing binding credit constraints or responding to a transitory income shock. Financial transfers however, may extend economic disparities across generations if the wealthy...

This paper begins the synthesis of two currently unrelated literatures: the human capital approach to health economics and the economics of cognitive and noncognitive skill formation. A lifecycle investment framework is the foundation for understanding the origins of human inequality and for...

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers’ prosocial attitudes are systematically related to...

This study of the emergence of inequality during the early years is based upon a comparative analysis of children at the age of about five years in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. We study a series of child outcomes related to readiness to learn, focusing on...

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 removed barriers to voting for Black Americans in the South; existing work documents that this in turn led to shifts in the distribution of public funding towards areas with a higher share of Black residents and also reduced Black-White earnings disparities....

Using every major nationally-representative dataset on parental and non-parental care provided to children up to age 6, we quantify differences in American children's care experiences by socioeconomic status (SES), proxied primarily with maternal education. Increasingly, higher-SES children...

This paper estimates the extent to which childhood circumstances contribute to health inequality in old age and evaluates the importance of major domains of childhood circumstances to health inequalities in the USA and China. We link two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal...

This paper examines the extent to which childhood circumstances contribute to health inequality in old age and how the contributions may vary across key dimensions of health. We link the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2013 and 2015 with its Life History Survey in 2014...

Childhood obesity has adverse health and productivity consequences and poses negative externalities to health services. Its increase in recent decades can be traced back to unhealthy habits acquired in the household. We investigate whether parental beliefs play a role by eliciting beliefs about...

Childhood circumstances may impact senior health, prompting this study to introduce novel machine learning methods to assess their individual and collective contributions to health inequality in old age. Using the US Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the China Health and Retirement...