When traditional measures for economic welfare are scarce or unreliable, stature and the body mass index (BMI) are now widely-accepted measures that reflect economic conditions. However, little work exists for late 19th and early 20th century women's BMIs in the US and how they varied with...

Much has been written about the modern obesity epidemic, and historical BMIs are low compared to their modern counterparts. However, interpreting BMI variation is difficult because BMIs increase when weight increases or when stature decreases, and the two have different implications for human...

Public educators and philanthropists in the late 19th century United States promoted the establishment of kindergartens in cities as a remedy for the social problems associated with industrialization and immigration. Between 1880 and 1910, more than seven thousand kindergartens opened their...

This paper analyzes the causal relationship between parental death during childhood and long-run labor market outcomes by examining the 1853 New Orleans yellow fever epidemic as a natural experiment. In 1853, nearly 8,000 New Orleanians died of yellow fever, leaving many broken families and...

The paper evaluates the long-run impact of charity nurseries for disadvantaged children in early 20th-century New York. Access to charity nurseries with kindergarten instruction raised children's years of education and reduced their likelihood of working in low-skilled jobs later in life....

While a growing literature has shown that empowering women leads to increased short-term investments in children, little is known about its long-term effects. We investigate the effect of women's political empowerment on children's human capital accumulation by exploiting plausibly exogenous...

The “fetal origin hypothesis” predicts that the exposure to unfavorable environments early in life negatively affects future health and non-health (e.g. income) outcomes. This paper evaluates this theory by examining the effect of in utero exposure to influenza pandemic of 1957-58, the 2nd...

While a growing literature has shown that empowering women leads to increased short-term investments in children, little is known about its long-term effects. We investigate the effect of women's political empowerment on children's human capital accumulation by exploiting plausibly exogenous...

This paper studies the impact of the First Great Migration on children. We use the complete-count 1940 Census to estimate selection-corrected place effects on education for children of Black migrants. On average, Black children gained 0.8 years of schooling (12 percent) by moving from the South...

A birth certificate establishes a child's legal identity and age, but few quantitative estimates of the significance of birth registration exist. Birth registration laws were enacted by U.S. states in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Using 1910-1930 census data, this study finds that minimum...