A growing body of evidence suggests large increases in criminal behavior and mortality coinciding with a young adult's 21st birthday, when alcohol consumption becomes legal. The policy implications from these findings have focused on the need to reduce drinking among young people, potentially by...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines the impact of high school cohort composition on the educational and labor market outcomes of individuals during their early 20s and again during their late 20s and early 30s. We find that the positive...

This paper estimates the effects of friends' health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends' health behaviors is identified by comparing...

In this paper, we use a longitudinal survey that has collected information for 50 years on a large cohort of Wisconsin high school graduates and their siblings to examine the long term impact of early occupational choice on health status. We find evidence that beginning a career in a blue collar...

Large literatures have shown important links between the quantity of completed education and health outcomes on one hand and the quality of schooling on a host of adult outcomes, such as wages, on the other hand. However, little research has been targeted to producing evidence of the link...

A national sample of US teenagers combined with a complementary sample of US adults are used to examine the effects of teenage childbearing on health behaviors by comparing female siblings in both the teenage sample and a sample of adults. Additionally, miscarriage information available in the...

This paper re-examines the effects of breastfeeding on long term educational outcomes using longitudinal data on siblings. While family fixed effects allow controls for all shared family factors, these estimators are sensitive to compensating or reinforcing behaviors by parents. These biases may...

There is a large literature that attempts to estimate the importance of peer effects for adolescent decision making, including alcohol consumption. There are several empirical difficulties in addressing this research question, including the endogeneity of peers, ‘third factors’ that affect...

This paper uses national longitudinal data and several new empirical strategies to examine the consequences of teenage fatherhood . The key contribution is to compare economic outcomes of young fathers to young men whose partners experienced a miscarriage rather than a live birth. The results...

This paper uses administrative data from the University of Texas-Austin to examine whether the number of same high school classmates at college entry influences college achievement, measured by grade point average (GPA) and persistence. For each freshman cohort from 1993 through 2003 we...