This paper examines the long-term effects of low birthweight (LBW) on educational attainments, labor market outcomes, and health status using data from the National Child Development Study. The study has followed the cohort of children born in Great Britain during one week in 1958 through age...

This paper is an empirical investigation of childhood and adolescent health and cognitive development as determined by family economic variables. The model proposed recognizes that these processes may be jointly dependent, and may in part be determined by common unobserved factors; these factors...

Inequality in income or earnings is the most indisputable fact about the distribution of income. Inequality in income distribution occurs in most political and economic models and has from ancient times to the modern era. Society and government have expressed a desire to establish a minimum...

We investigate when and how health shocks reverberate across the life cycle and down to descendants in a manual labor economy by examining the association of war wounds with the socioeconomic status and older age mortality of US CivilWar (1861-5) veterans and of their adult children. Younger...

A growing body of empirical work shows that social recognition of individuals' behavior can meaningfully influence individuals' choices. This paper studies whether social recognition is a socially efficient lever for influencing individuals' choices. Because social recognition generates utility...

We propose a general analytical framework to model the redistributive features of alternative pension systems when individuals face ex ante differences in mortality. Differences in life expectancy between high and low socioeconomic groups are often large and have widened recently in many...

Analyzing Florida birth certificates matched to school records, we document that the female advantage in childhood behavioral and academic outcomes is driven by gender gaps at the extremes of the outcome distribution. Using unconditional quantile regression, we investigate whether family...

Reports of pain differ markedly across socioeconomic groups and are correlated with outcomes such as functional limitations and disability insurance receipt. This paper examines the differential experience of pain by education. We focus on knee pain, the most common musculoskeletal complaint....

Social connections are fundamental to human wellbeing. This paper examines the social networks of young married women in rural Odisha, India. This is a group for whom highly-gendered norms around marriage, mobility and work are likely to shape opportunities to form and maintain meaningful ties...

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...