The National Children's Study, undertaken in 2000 by collaboration among several federal government agencies led by NICHD, CDC, and EPA, is one of the largest and boldest longitudinal study of children's health ever undertaken. One of the key design issues has been the nature of the NCS sample....

Using data from the NLSY97, we construct two measures of poverty using the official definition and The National Research Council (NRC) definition. We estimate the two poverty rates for 1996 for youths 12-16 as 17.9 (official) and 23.4 (NRC), and document the discrepancies between youths...

This paper investigates the decision to have an abortion. It does so in a pregnancy-by-pregnancy context over the time interval from the mid-1950s through 1991. The analysis frames the choice as one made at the time the pregnancy is confirmed, and suggests that the decision is influenced by age,...

Using the 1958 British Birth Cohort dataset and its supplemental survey of biological children, the Children of the National Child Development Study, this paper investigates the influence of family attributes and behaviors on children’s verbal ability measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary...

It is a popular activity among public intellectuals to speak about the demise of the family and the decline in marriage as a social institution. No knowledgeable observer would argue that there are no major social ills associated with the functioning of the American family. Consider children:...

The paper compares the cognitive test scores of children in Great Britain and the United States in vocabulary, reading, mathematics and memory of words and numbers. Children age 5-9 in Britain systematically out-perform their U.S. counterparts on reading and mathematics tests, while children age...

The paper investigates the influence of two distinct family "constraints" on children’s test scores in reading and mathematics. One is the family’s resources – its income level, the education of the parents, and one of the parents own ability in reading and math. The influence of this...