Substantial international aid is spent reducing the cost of contraception in developing countries, as part of a larger effort to reduce global fertility and increase investment per child worldwide. The importance for fertility behaviors of keeping contraceptive prices low, however, remains...

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray demonstrate that a mother's score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) is a powerful predictor of her child's score on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT). We replicate this finding for PPVT and two related tests. However, even after...

Whereas attitudes towards risk are thought to play an important role in many decisions over the life-course, factors that affect those attitudes are not fully understood. Using longitudinal survey data collected in Mexico before and during the Mexican war on drugs, we investigate how an...

Little is known about the long-term effects of participation in Head Start. This paper draws on unique non-experimental data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to provide new evidence on the effects of participation in Head Start on schooling attainment, earnings, and criminal behavior....

Recent research on Head Start, an enriched preschool program for poor children that effects on test scores fade out' more quickly for black children than for white children. This" paper uses data from the 1988 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to show that" black children who...

Poor educational attainment is a persistent problem among Latino children, relative to non-Latinos. This paper examines the effects of participation in the Head Start program on Latinos. We find that large and significant benefits accrue to Head Start children when we compare them to siblings...

Although there is a broad hi-partisan support for Head Start, the evidence of positive longterm effects of the program is not overwhelming. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey's Child-Mother file, we examine the impact of the program on a range of child outcomes. We compare...

Understanding how mortality and fertility are linked is essential to the study of population dynamics. We investigate the fertility response to an unanticipated mortality shock that resulted from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed large shares of the residents of some Indonesian...

The impact of exposure to a major unanticipated natural disaster on the evolution of survivors’ attitudes toward risk is examined, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in combination with rich population-representative longitudinal survey data...