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...

Using 10 years of enrollment data at four Texas public universities, this paper examines whether, to what extent, and in what ways high school attended contributes to racial and ethnic differences in college achievement. Like previous studies, we show that controlling for class rank and test...

A novel hypothesis posits that levels of genetic diversity in a population may partially explain variation in the development and success of countries. Our paper extends evidence on this novel question by subjecting the hypothesis to an alternative context that eliminates many alternative...

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...

Smoking and drinking are critical problems in adolescence that have long-term adverse impacts on health and socio-economic factors. We examine the extent to which family stresses influence the timing of initiation of smoking and drinking. Using national panel data from the National Educational...

Research has shown that low birth weight is linked to infant mortality as well as longer term outcomes. This paper examines the medium term outcomes that may link low birth weight to adult disadvantage using a national longitudinal sample with a large sample of siblings (Add Health). Results...