There is a well known positive association between family income and children's development, including health and academic performance. This relationship is a potentially importance factor in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status and has been shown to be a robust finding...

This paper examines the demographic pattern of friendship links among youth and the impact of those patterns on own educational outcomes using the friendship network data in the Add Health. We develop and estimate a reduced form matching model to predict friendship link formation and identify...

While large literatures have shown that cognitive ability and schooling increases employment and wages, an emerging literature examines the importance of so-called “non-cognitive skills” in producing labor market outcomes. However, this smaller literature has not typically used causal...

This paper examines the impact of job loss due to business closings on body mass index (BMI) and alcohol consumption. We suggest that the ambiguous findings in the extant literature may be due in part to unobserved heterogeneity in response and in part due to an overly broad measure of job loss...

I use SHARE social networks data from 16 countries to examine retirement impacts on social networks. I extend the literature by using across-country differences in pension eligibility ages as instruments to show limited impacts of retirement on social network outcomes.

This paper uses data from nearly 15,000 young adult respondents to the Add Health survey to examine racial and gender differences in the perceptions and social rewards to weight. The data include information on several typically unmeasured domains: self-perceptions of ideal weight,...

In 1936, the US government enacted the later-known Bonus Act, which triggered cash transfers to about 3 million veterans who had served in World War I. This paper studies the long-run benefits of veterans’ bonus receipt on their children’s old-age longevity. We employ data from Social...

Childhood and adolescent obesity is associated with serious lifetime health consequences and has seen a recent rapid increase in prevalence. Soft drink consumption has also expanded rapidly, so much so that soft drinks are currently the largest single contributors to energy intake. In this...

Over the last decade, the federal government has directed schools to provide educational instruction for students with special needs in general education setting to the extent possible. While there is mixed evidence on the effects of these inclusion policies on the students with special needs,...

This paper contributes to the literature on the relationship between adolescent depression and educational attainment in several ways. First, while cross sectional data are normally used to assess the importance of the relationship, this paper uses longitudinal data in order to defend against...