This paper examines whether nutritional disruptions experienced during the stage of fetal development impair an individual’s labor market productivity later in life. We consider intrauterine exposure to the month of Ramadan as a natural experiment that might cause shocks to the inflow of...

Although the impact of education on health is important for economic policy in developing countries, the overwhelming majority of research to identify the health returns to education has been done using data from developed countries. We use data from three waves of a nationally-representative...

There have been numerous attempts to both document the income-health gradient in children and to understand the nature of the tie. In this paper we review and summarize existing studies and then use a unique school based panel data set from the US to attempt to further our understanding of the...

While several types of mental illness, including substance abuse disorders, have been linked with poor labor market outcomes, no current research has been able to examine the effects of childhood ADHD. As ADHD has become one of the most prevalent childhood mental conditions, it is useful to...

A common heuristic for evaluating robustness of results to omitted variable bias is to look at coefficient movements after inclusion of controls. This heuristic is informative only if selection on observables is proportional to selection on unobservables. I formalize this link, drawing on theory...

Occupational licensing laws have been relaxed in a large number of U.S. states to give nurse practitioners the ability to perform more tasks without the supervision of medical doctors. We investigate how these regulations may affect wages, employment, costs, and quality of providing certain...

This paper uses recently released data from a national longitudinal sample to present new evidence of the longer term effects of adolescent depression on labor market outcomes. Results suggest reductions in labor force attachment of approximately 5 percentage points and earnings reductions of...

While the link between physical activity and health has been studied, there are several limitations that persist in this literature relating to external and internal validity of the estimates, potential measurement error in self-reported weight and risk factors, failure to account for physical...

Adverse behavioral risk factors contribute to a large share of deaths. We examine the effects on life expectancy (LE) and quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE) of changes in six major behavioral risk factors over the 1960-2010 period: smoking, obesity, heavy alcohol use, and unsafe use of...

Non-compliance with medication therapy remains an unsolved and expensive problem for health care systems around the world. Yet we know little about the factors that determine a patient's decision to follow treatment recommendations. This study uses a unique panel dataset comprising all...