We exploit the natural experiment provided by the Vietnam lottery draft to evaluate the intergenerational effect of fathers' draft eligibility on children's propensity to engage in risky health behaviors during adolescence using the NLSY97. Draft eligibility increases measures of substance use,...

This paper analyzes the relationship between having one or more father figures and the likelihood that young people engage in delinquent criminal behavior. We pay particular attention to distinguishing the roles of residential and non-residential, biological fathers as well as stepfathers. Using...

More able parents tend to have more able children. While few would question the validity of this statement, there is little large-scale evidence on the intergenerational transmission of IQ scores. Using a larger and more comprehensive dataset than previous work, we are able to estimate the...

Few studies in the economics literature have linked individuals' criminal behavior to changes in their personal circumstances. Life shocks, such as natural or personal disasters, could reduce or sever a person's connections to his/her family, job, or community. With fewer connections, crime may...

We find substantial and statistically significant detrimental effects of fathers' multiple-partner fertility (MPF) on children's educational outcomes. We focus on children in fathers' "second families" when the second families are nuclear families - households consisting of a man, a woman, their...

Whether and how a paternal health shock cascades across multiple generations to affect descendant health is understudied even though a link between ancestral living conditions and descendant health may constitute an important source of differences in the stock of health capital across families...

We use a unique data set of linked birth records from Florida to analyze the intergenerational transmission of health at birth by parental gender. We show that both paternal and maternal birth weights significantly predict the child's birth weight, even after accounting for all genetic and...

This paper tests whether mothers and fathers differ in their spending on their daughters relative to their sons. We compare mothers' and fathers' willingness to pay (WTP) for specific goods for their children, diverging from the previous literature's approach of comparing the expenditure effects...

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. This paper examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family...

In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage:...