A large literature has documented links between harmful early life exposures and later life health and socioeconomic deficits. These studies, however, are typically unable to examine the possibility that these shocks are transmitted to the next generation. Our study traces the impacts of in...

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...

A novel hypothesis posits that levels of genetic diversity in a population may partially explain variation in the development and success of countries. Our paper extends evidence on this novel question by subjecting the hypothesis to an alternative context that eliminates many alternative...

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...

Although the measurement of intergenerational income mobility has seen a rapid increase in attention and policy discussions, similar examinations of educational mobility in the U.S. are lacking. This paper begins to fill this gap by documenting differences in educational mobility across time...

In this paper, we estimate the impacts of abortion clinic closures on access to clinics in terms of distance and congestion, abortion rates, and birth rates. Legislation regulating abortion providers enacted in Wisconsin in 2011-2013 ultimately led to the closure of two of five abortion clinics...

Nascent research suggests intergenerational health mobility may be relatively high and non-genetic factors may make room for policy intervention. This project broadens this direction by considering heterogeneous intergenerational health mobility in spatial and contextual patterns. With 14,797...

The multi-decade growth and spatial dispersion of immigrant families in the United States has shifted the composition of US schools, reshaping the group of peers with whom students age through adolescence. US-born students are more likely to have foreign-born peers and foreign-born students are...