Recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors, including maternal education, behaviors, and participation in social programs. In turn, endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes, and of the outcomes of future generations. Exposure to environmental pollution is...

This paper reviews the recent literature on the production of skills of young persons. The literature features the multiplicity of skills that explain success in a variety of life outcomes. Noncognitive skills play a fundamental role in successful lives. The dynamics of skill formation reveal...

Nearly one million American youth have participated in service programs such as Peace Corps and Teach For America. This paper provides the first causal estimate of the impact of service programs on those who serve, using data from a web-based survey of former Teach For America applicants. We...

We ask whether failing one or more of the state-mandated high-school exit examinations affects whether students graduate from high school. Using a new multi-dimensional regression-discontinuity approach, we examine simultaneously scores on mathematics and English language arts tests. Barely...

We study social interactions in the risky behavior of best-friend pairs in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Focusing on friends who had not yet initiated a particular behavior (sex, smoking, marijuana use, truancy) by the first wave of the survey, we estimate...

While the contemporaneous association between mental health problems and criminal behavior has been explored in the literature, the long-term consequences of such problems, depression in particular, have received much less attention. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent...

We examine the effects of fast-food restaurant advertising on television on the body composition of adolescents as measured by percentage body fat (PBF) and to assess the sensitivity of these effects to using conventional measures of youth obesity based on body-mass index (BMI). We merge...

Are smarter machines our children's friends? Or can they bring about a transfer from our relatively unskilled children to ourselves that leaves our children and, indeed, all our descendants - worse off? This, indeed, is the dire message of the model presented here in which smart machines...

This paper evaluates one of the first implemented provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) which permits young adults up to age 26 to enroll as dependents on a parent's private health plan. The paper also considers how the interaction between prior state laws expanding...

This paper estimates the effects of friends' health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends' health behaviors is identified by comparing...