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...

This paper uses recently released data from a national longitudinal sample to present new evidence of the longer term effects of adolescent depression on labor market outcomes. Results suggest reductions in labor force attachment of approximately 5 percentage points and earnings reductions of...

The sales tax shows wide variation across states. Rates differ, some states allow local options, and the base can vary dramatically. Consumer items like food are often afforded preferential treatment, and business purchases like manufacturing machinery are exempt in some states. There is no...

We test whether adverse childhood experiences exposure to parental maltreatment and its indirect effect on health are associated with age 30 personality traits. We use rich longitudinal data from a large, representative cohort of young US Americans and exploit differences across siblings to...

This paper uses data from nearly 15,000 young adult respondents to the Add Health survey to examine racial and gender differences in the perceptions and social rewards to weight. The data include information on several typically unmeasured domains: self-perceptions of ideal weight,...

There is a well known positive association between family income and children's development, including health and academic performance. This relationship is a potentially importance factor in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status and has been shown to be a robust finding...

This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify...