We hypothesize that the impact of antibiotics is moderated by a population's 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...

A large economics literature has shown long term impacts of birth weight on adult outcomes, including IQ and earnings that are often robust to sibling or twin fixed effects. We examine potential mechanisms underlying these effects by incorporating findings from the genetics and neuroscience...

Although there is a vast literature linking education and later health outcomes, the mechanisms underlying these associations are relatively unknown. In the spirit of some medical literature that leverages developmental abnormalities to understand mechanisms of normative functioning, we explore...

A large literature links early environments and later outcomes, such as cognition; however, little is known about the mechanisms. One potential mechanism is sensitivity to early environments that is moderated or amplified by the genotype. With this mechanism in mind, a complementary literature...

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...

This study examines the long-term effects of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission's (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...

Previous studies document the potential links between early-life insults and life-cycle outcomes. However, fewer studies examine the effects of local labor market shocks during early-life on old-age male mortality. This article empirically investigates this link using a large-scale...