This paper explores individual and contextual factors related to the development of hopeful attitudes during adolescence using a nationally representative study. A key focus is on the experiences of maltreatment by adults, both for the adolescent and his/her classmates. While all types of...

This paper explores gene-environmental interactions between family environments and children's genetic scores in determining educational attainment. The central question is whether poor childhood family environments reduce the ability for children to leverage their genetic gifts to achieve high...

This research note explores the consequences of dispositional optimism and hopefulness when the environment changes. Much literature has documented the importance of a positive outlook in pursuing investments in health and education that pay off in the future. A question that has received less...

While nearly all colleges and universities in the United States use academic probation as a means to signal to students a need to improve performance, very little is known about the use of this designation and the programs that accompany it on college success. This paper uses a regression...

This note's aim is to investigate the sensitivity of Christakis and Fowler's claim (NEJM July 26, 2007) that obesity has spread through social networks. It is well known in the economics literature that failure to include contextual effects can lead to spurious inference on social network...

Prior studies have established that higher educational attainment is associated with a longer telomere length (TL), a marker of cellular aging. However, it is unclear whether extant associations are causal, since they are likely confounded by unobserved genetic, early-life and family background...

Recent evidence has suggested that popularity during high school is linked with wages during mid-life using the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The results were shown to be robust to a large set of individual-level heterogeneity included completed schooling, cognitive ability, and personality...

Recent studies analyzing the effects of religion on various economic, social, health and political outcomes have been largely associational. Although some attempts have been made to establish causation using instrument variable (IV) or difference-in-difference (DID) methods, the instruments and...

This paper examines the impact of youth friendship links on student's own academic performance (grade point average) using the Add Health. We estimate a reduced form, high dimensional fixed effects model of within cohort or grade friendship links, and use this model to predict each student's...

BackgroundCurrent methods used in medical literatures to estimate social network effects of health outcomes may be biased to find these effects, even if none actually exist. ObjectiveTo investigate whether we detect network effects for health outcomes that are unlikely to be subject to network...