We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine trends in the receipt of child support (and the determinants of trends) between 1968 and 1997. The findings suggest that political, demographic, and economic forces all exerted downward pressure on child-support payments during this...

Hurricane Katrina displaced approximately 650,000 people and destroyed or severely damaged 217,000 homes along the Gulf Coast. Damage was especially severe in New Orleans, and the return of displaced residents to this city has been slow. The fraction of households receiving mail (which, in the...

Wealthier people live longer and experience less morbidity than do poorer people, in both developed and developing countries. While the association between income and health status has been well documented, the mechanisms leading to this correlation are unclear. In this paper, we use data...

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to low-income public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by the MTO demonstration to estimate the effects of neighborhoods on youth crime and...

The topic of this paper is the relationship between relative income and health. We examine whether people whose incomes are high relative to others who live in the same geographic area have lower or higher mortality. This analysis holds own income fixed, so the question is not only whether own...

We examine the relationship between early cognitive development, socio-economic status (SES), child health, and parenting in a developing country. Using a sample of over 3000 preschool age children from Ecuador, we analyze determinants of children’s scores on a widelyused test of language...

Immigrants who enter the United States later in life comprise a growing share of legal permanent resident admissions. Due to their short working lives in the US and barriers to obtaining earned and means-tested public benefits since 1996, late-age immigrants may be at significant economic...

We examine the impact of orphanhood on children’s school enrollment in10 Sub-Saharan African countries. Although poorer children in Africa are less likely to attend school, the lower enrollment of orphans is not accounted for solely by their poverty. We find orphans are less likely to be...

Understanding whether the gradient in children’s health becomes steeper with age is an important first step in uncovering the mechanisms that connect economic and health status, and in recommending sensible interventions to protect children’s health. To that end, this paper examines why two...

This paper examines how child maltreatment is affected by the economic circumstances of parents. “Child maltreatment” encompasses a wide range of behaviors that adversely affect children. It includes neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse or neglect. Using...