Cohort Studies

This paper proposes that the adoption of the modern U.S. mortgage (i.e., low down payment, long-term, and fixed-rate)led by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans Administration (VA) loan insurance programsset the stage for the mid-twentieth century U.S. baby boom by dramatically...

In the presence of segregation and discrimination during the late 19th and early 20th century, many African American men changed their racial identity and passed for white. Previous studies have suggested that this activity was associated with increases in income and socioeconomic status despite the...

We use administrative records on the healthcare utilization and economic outcomes of the universe of Danish households to characterize survivors' mental health following their spouse's death. We provide visually clear evidence for the inevitable immediate, large, and lingering adverse impacts and...

Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data...

Explanations for the West's escape from premature mortality have focused on chronic malnutrition or income and on public health or state capacity. We argue that by ignoring the multigenerational effects of variance in ancestors' harvests, we are underestimating the contribution of modern economic...

How can we use the novel capacities of large language models (LLMs) in empirical research? And how can we do so while accounting for their limitations, which are themselves only poorly understood? We develop an econometric framework to answer this question that distinguishes between two types of...

This paper provides an overview of recent empirical and methodological advances in the study of historical intergenerational mobility trends, with a focus on key measurement challenges. These advances are made possible by the recent digitization of historical censuses and new methods of historical...

This study examines the long-term effects of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commissions (RSC) hookworm eradication campaign, initiated in the American South in the 1910s, on old-age longevity. Utilizing Social Security Administration death records linked to the 1940 full-count census, we employ a...

This paper documents persistence in the power of elite families in Central China despite dynastic change. We study the impact of the fall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) on couples and their descendants (treatment of people), and present evidence on the response of multigenerational family lines to...

In recent years, important and headline-grabbing findings have emerged from research using individual income tax data for statistical purposes. Demand for these microdata, accessible under the tax administration authority of the Internal Revenue Code and through the IRS Statistics of Income (SOI)...

Poverty is strongly associated with worse health across countries and within countries across individuals. However, not all poor individuals suffer from poor health: the effects of poverty on health vary across place and time. In this review, we discuss the evidence documenting these patterns, and...

As the workforce in Europe and the US has grown older, the average wages of older workers have risen more rapidly than those of their younger colleagues. This seems inconsistent with a simple supply-and-demand analysis, which would suggest that as the supply of older workers grows, their wages...

This study exploits experimental variation in parent human capital (early-life school-based deworming) and a shock to schooling (extended Covid closures) to estimate how these factors interact in the production of child human capital within a sample of 3,500 Kenyan 3-8 year olds. Parents with...

This paper studies the interaction between the decrease in the gender pay gap and the stagnation in the careers of younger workers, analyzing data from the United States, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We propose a model of the labor market in which a larger supply of older workers can crowd...

We present new evidence on the long-run trend of occupational task content by race in the United States, 1900-2021. Black workers began the transition to better paid, cognitive-intensive modern jobs at least a generation after white workers; substantial convergence only occurred from 1960 onwards....

This paper studies long-run differences in intergenerational occupational mobility between Black and White Americans. Combining data from linked historical censuses and contemporary large-scale surveys, we provide a comprehensive set of mobility measures based on Markov chains that trace the short-...

This study investigates the growing wage disparity between older and younger workers in high-income countries. We propose a conceptual framework of the labor market in which firms cannot change the contracts of older employees and cannot freely add higher-ranked positions to their organizations. In...

In the early decades of the twentieth century, many American cities installed municipal water systems. A wide range of materials were used for pipes, but lead was a common choice due to its durability, ease of installation, and relatively low incidence of leaks. In Toxified to the Bone: Early-Life...

Using cross-sectional data files for the United States we show that difficulties experienced in childhood - so-called Adverse Child Experiences (ACE)s - are strongly and significantly associated with mental health in adulthood. Our evidence is taken from eight Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance...

When a new technology threatens to take away jobs in an established industry, employment in that industry declines and wages rise. Workers demand extra pay an obsolescence rent to enter a soon-to-be-outdated profession. Young workers are less likely to enter such an industry but older workers may...

Several research strands document the life-cycle impacts of lead exposure during early life. Yet little is known about the long-run effects of lead exposure during early life on old-age mortality outcomes. In this study, we employ Social Security Administration death records linked to the full-count...

Efforts to document long-term trends in socioeconomic mobility in the US have been hindered by the lack of large, representative datasets linking parents to adult children, a challenge especially acute for women due to surname changes. We use a new dataset, the Census Tree, which incorporates...

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing...

Two landmark pieces of federal legislation in the early 1960s targeted pay discrimination against women. In How the 1963 Equal Pay Act and 1964 Civil Rights Act Shaped the Gender Gap in Pay (NBER Working Paper 31332), Martha J. Bailey, Thomas E. Helgerman, and Bryan A. Stuart present new estimates...

We present an econometric structure for the analysis of intergenerational mobility that integrates non-linearities, the role of maternal-side effects and the impact of grandparents. We show how previously estimated models are special cases of this general framework and what specific assumptions each...

We study the role of marriage for women's intergenerational mobility during the Ming-Qing (1368-1911) period. Using status information based on the timing of marriage from family histories in Central China, already in the early 1500s it is the case that daughters from rich families attain higher...

The Census Tree is the largest-ever database of record links among the historical U.S. censuses, with over 700 million links for people living in the United States between 1850 and 1940. These high-quality links allow researchers in the social sciences and other disciplines to construct a...

A significant literature has documented trend increases in pain among Americans over the last two or three decades. There is no single explanation seeming to work well for the increase. We show that, rather than resulting from a smooth upward trend, the increase was almost entirely concentrated in...

We examine the mortality effects of a 1947 school reform in Japan, which extended compulsory schooling from primary to secondary school by as much as 3 years. The abolition of secondary school fees also indicates that those affected by the reform likely came from disadvantaged families who could...

In the 1960s, two landmark statutesthe Equal Pay and Civil Rights Actstargeted the long-standing practice of employment discrimination against U.S. women. For the next 15 years, the gender gap in median earnings among full-time, full-year workers changed little, leading many scholars to conclude the...

While hypothesis testing is a highly formalized activity, hypothesis generation remains largely informal. We propose a systematic procedure to generate novel hypotheses about human behavior, which uses the capacity of machine learning algorithms to notice patterns people might not. We illustrate the...

The number of adults worldwide who are overweight or obese is rising, with much of the increase driven by developing countries. Famine exposure at early ages is a contributing factor, and it is not clear whether such exposure transmits across generations. In Overweight Grandsons and Grandfathers...

The causal effects of fertility are a central focus in the social sciences, but the analysis is challenged by the endogeneity of fertility choices. Earlier work has proposed several natural experiments from twin births or gender composition of earlier births to assess whether having more children...

This paper introduces four new intergenerational and multigenerational datasets which follow both sons and daughters and which can be used to study the persistence of longevity, socioeconomic status, family structure, and geographic mobility across generations. The data follow the children of Black...

Much of the increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity has been in developing countries with a history of famines and malnutrition. Prior research has pointed to the association between overweight and famine exposure during developmental ages as one of several explanations and has...

A rich literature shows that early life conditions shape later life outcomes, including health and migration events. However, analyses of geographic disparities in mortality outcomes focus almost exclusively on contemporaneously measured geographic place (e.g., state of residence at death), thereby...

We use a panel survey of ~19,000 primary-school-aged children in rural Tamil Nadu to study learning loss after COVID-19-induced school closures, and the pace of recovery after schools reopened. Students tested in December 2021 (18 months after school closures) displayed learning deficits of ~0.7...

Intensive agriculture and deep plowing resulted in top-soil erosion and dust storms during the 1930s. These effects have been shown to affect agricultural income and land values that persisted for years. Given the growing literature on the relevance of in-utero and early-life exposures, it is...

Historically, a large majority of the newly elected members of the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS) were men. Within the past two decades, however, that situation has changed, and in the last 3 years women made up about 40 percent of the new...

Sub-Saharan Africa exhibits higher fertility and lower education than other world regions. Economic and demographic theory posit that these phenomena are linked, with slow fertility decline connected to slow education growth among both adults and children. Using microdata from 33 African countries,...

We hypothesize that the impact of antibiotics is moderated by a populations inherent (genetic) resistance to infectious disease. Using the introduction of sulfa drugs in 1937, we show that US states that are more genetically susceptible to infectious disease saw larger declines in their bacterial...

Recent studies based on 20th century US data conclude that abortion access raises childrens average socioeconomic outcomes. We generalize a model of fertility, highlighting assumptions under which these abortion predictions can be reversed. Using 19th century abortion restrictions, we empirically...

T he COVID-19 pandemic has had important effects not just in hospital intensive care units, but in maternity wards as well. In The US COVID-19 Baby Bust and Rebound (NBER Working Paper 30000), Melissa Schettini Kearney and Phillip B. Levine document a large drop in births associated with conceptions...

We explore the labor market for Hispanic high school graduates in the United States by age using information from the US Census, American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and three laboratory experiments. We find, in general, that the differences in outcomes for Hispanic and non-Hispanic...

We examine individuals decision to attend Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations calling for less stringent public health measures to combat COVID-19 (e.g., for swifter reopening of businesses). Our analysis is facilitated by a unique staggered panel data set originally constructed to study...

A federal welfare reform that took effect August 22, 1996, required that low-income children with disabilities be medically evaluated as part of the Social Security Administrations process for determining whether they would continue receiving cash assistance as adults in the Supplemental Security...

Using data across countries and over time we show that women are unhappier than men in unhappiness and negative affect equations, irrespective of the measure used anxiety, depression, fearfulness, sadness, loneliness, anger and they have more days with bad mental health and more restless sleep....

We study the intergenerational persistence of inequality by estimating grandmother-mother associations in the loss of a child, using pooled data from 119 Demographic and Health Surveys in 44 developing countries. Compared with compatriots of the same age, women with at least one sibling who died in...

We estimate the effect of losing Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits at age 18 on criminal justice and employment outcomes over the next two decades. To estimate this effect, we use a regression discontinuity design in the likelihood of being reviewed for SSI eligibility at age 18 created by...