Recipients of government transfers are economically disadvantaged, yet little is known about how their circumstances evolve leading up to program receipt. Using twenty-five years of survey data as well as administrative health records, we establish three new stylized facts around enrollment in...

Despite a recent and dramatic re-evaluation of the health consequences of alcohol consumption, very little is known about the effects of in utero exposure to alcohol on long-run outcomes such as later-life mortality. Here, we investigate how state by year variation in alcohol control arising...

This paper contributes to the literature on the labor market consequences of unhealthy behaviors and poor health by examining a previously underappreciated consequence of the rise in obesity in the United States: challenges for military recruitment. Specifically, this paper estimates the percent...

We examine the effect of joint custody on marriage, divorce, fertility and female employment in Austria using individual-level administrative data, covering the entire population. We also use unique data obtained from court records to analyze the effect on post-divorce outcomes. Our estimates...

Since the 1970s almost all states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. We analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on the incidence of marriage and divorce. Our identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across states and the control group of...

This paper studies retirement and child support policies in a small, open, overlapping-generations economy with PAYG social security and endogenous retirement and fertility decisions. It demonstrates that neither fertility nor retirement choices necessarily coincide with socially optimal...

Paul Samuelson made a series of important contributions to population theory for humans and other species, evolutionary theory, and the theory of age structured life cycles in economic equilibrium and growth. The work is highly abstract but much of it was intended to illuminate issues of...

Most conceptualisations of the bottom billion assume that "the poor" are a minority group in a state of continuous dependency, identifiable by region and demographic. Using a flow analysis (inflow and outflow) of poverty, rather than a stock analysis, we explain why poverty is more appropriately...

This paper analyzes transitions into and out of 3 different labor market states, social assistance, unemployment and employment. We estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model, controlling for endogenous initial condition and unobserved heterogeneity, using a large representative Swedish panel...

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic as a natural experiment to examine whether air pollution affects susceptibility to infectious disease. The empirical analysis combines the sharp timing of the pandemic with large cross-city differences in baseline pollution measures based on coal-fired...