This paper develops and estimates a model with multiple schooling choices that identifies the causal effect of different levels of schooling on health, health-related behaviors, and labor market outcomes. We develop an approach that is a halfway house between a reduced form treatment effect...

While previous studies have shown that recessions are associated with better health outcomes and behaviors, the focus of these studies has been on the relatively milder recessions of the late 20th century. In this paper, we examine if the previously established counter-cyclical pattern in health...

We investigate long-run effects of episodes of hunger experienced as a child on health status and behavioral outcomes in later life. We combine self-reported data on hunger experiences from SHARELIFE, a retrospective survey conducted as part of SHARE in Europe in 2009, with administrative data...

This paper considers the relationship between local economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation. After reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more- and less-disaggregated analyses – including an investigation of the migratory response to...

We study the impact of language deficiency on the health production of childhood migrants to Australia. Our identification strategy relies on a quasi-experiment comparing immigrants arriving at different ages and from different linguistic origins by utilising a measure of differences along a...

Two-way causation issues are the bete noire of life satisfaction research. As acknowledged in several landmark reviews, many variables routinely reported as causes or determinants of life satisfaction could equally well be consequences, or perhaps both causes and consequences (Diener, 1984; Diener,...

We investigate sibling correlations in health status using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and Bayesian methods that allow us to estimate the covariance structure of a system of latent variable equations. Across a battery of outcomes, we estimate that between 50% and 60% of health status can...

In this paper, we use the death file from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to investigate the relationship between county-level unemployment rates and mortality risk. After partialling out important confounding factors including baseline health status as well as state and industry fixed...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...

This paper analyzes the impact of rainfall fluctuations during the gestational period on health at birth. We concentrate on the semiarid region of Northeastern Brazil to highlight the role of water scarcity as a determinant of early life health. We find that negative rainfall shocks are robustly...