An extensive literature has documented a robust correlation between socioeconomic status--measured in a variety of ways--and health outcomes; however, much uncertainty remains regarding what causal processes underlie this association. The present paper builds on a growing literature that seeks...

Recently, the sex of child has been widely used as a natural experiment and shown to induce change of the allegedly stable political predisposition, however, prior results have been contradictory: in the U.K., researchers found that having daughters leads to parents favoring left-wing political...

Studies of online dating suggest that physical attraction is a key factor in early relationship formation, but say little about the role of attractiveness in longer-term relationships. Meanwhile, assortative coupling and exchange models widely employed in demographic research overlook the...

The list experiment is used to detect latent beliefs when researchers suspect a substantial degree of social desirability bias from respondents. This methodology has been used in areas ranging from racial attitudes to political preferences. Meanwhile, social psychologists interested in the...

Research on the effects of Vietnam military service suggests that Vietnam veterans experienced significantly higher mortality than both non-Vietnam veterans and the civilian population at large. These results, however, may be biased by non-random selection into the military if unobserved...

This study uses exogenous variation in sibling sex composition to estimate the causal effect of sibship size on boys’ probabilities of private school attendance and grade retention. Using the 1990 U.S. Census, we find that for second-born boys, increased sibship size reduces the likelihood of...

Previous research on the effect of body mass on economic outcomes has used a variety of methods to mitigate endogeneity bias. We extend this research by using an older sample of U.S. individuals from the PSID. This sample allows us to examine age-gender interactive effects. Through...