This paper estimates the effect of the childhood environment on a large array of social and economic outcomes lasting almost 60 years, for both the affected cohorts and for their children. To do this, we exploit a natural experiment provided by the 1949 Magic Carpet operation, where over 50,000...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended health and living standards around the world. This article provides an interim overview of these effects, with a particular focus on low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Economists have explained how the pandemic is likely to have differential consequences...

We expand on earlier studies investigating the links between early health and later health by including different dimensions of early-life health and multiple life course outcomes consisting of the age of onset of serious cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and multiple job-related health outcomes....

We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Our interpretation is that highly trusting individuals tend to assume too much social risk and to be cheated...

We survey the quantitative research literature linking climate and conflict, a body of research that spans multiple academic disciplines and has roughly doubled in size in the last decade. It makes three main contributions. First, we carry out a meta-analysis - updating Hsiang et al (2013) and...

We use comparable micro data sets for the U.S. and Canada to study the responses of young workers to the external labor market forces that have affected the two countries over the past 25 years. We find that young workers adjust to changes in labor market opportunities through a variety of...

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...

In this paper I first analyze the wage effects of immigrants on native workers in the US economy and its top immigrant-receiving states and metropolitan areas. Then I quantify the consequences of these wage effects on the poverty rates of native families. The goal is to establish whether the...

In the late nineteenth century, the North American bison was brought to the brink of extinction in just over a decade. We demonstrate that the loss of the bison had immediate, negative consequences for the Native Americans who relied on them and ultimately resulted in a permanent reversal of...

We investigate how material well-being has changed over time for single mother headed families--the primary group affected by welfare reform and other policy changes of the 1990s. We focus on consumption as well as other indicators including components of consumption, measures of housing...