We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health and...

Recent work shows that peers affect student achievement, but the mechanisms are not well understood. I show that peer behavior is an important mechanism, perhaps more so than ability, by exploiting exogenous timing in diagnosis/treatment of ADD among peers that improves peer behavior while...

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...

In this paper we estimate the causal income elasticity of smoking participation, cessation, and cigarette demand conditional upon participation. Using an instrumental variables (IV) estimation strategy we find that smoking appears to be a normal good among low-income adults: higher instrumented...

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...

We use the 1997 Education Law in Turkey that increased compulsory formal schooling from five to eight years to study the effect of women's education on a range of outcomes relating to women's fertility, their children's health and measures of empowerment. We apply an instrumental variables...

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...

We study the drivers of geographic variation in US health care utilization, using an empirical strategy that exploits migration of Medicare patients to separate the role of demand and supply factors. Our approach allows us to account for demand differences driven by both observable and...

A key decision in research is whether to try out new ideas or build on more established ideas. In this paper, we evaluate which type of work is more likely to spur further invention. When recent advances create superior opportunities for invention, their adoption as research inputs in the...