We consider the effects of school quality on health using the introduction of the Rosenwald schools which expanded educational opportunities for African Americans living in rural areas of the South during the early part of the 20th century. Prior research has shown that the Great Migration...

Chay, Guryan and Mazumder (2009) found substantial racial convergence in AFQT and NAEP scores across cohorts born in the 1960s and early 1970s that was concentrated among blacks in the South. We demonstrated a close tracking between variation in the test score convergence across states and...

This article examines how the financial health changes following an individual's enrollment in Michigan's Medicaid program (Healthy Michigan Program, HMP). We use unique data that links credit reports of HMP enrollees to Medicaid administrative data on enrollment and use of health care services....

We use the Islamic holy month of Ramadan as a natural experiment in fasting and fetal health. In Michigan births 1989-2006, we find prenatal exposure to Ramadan among Arab mothers results in lower birthweight and reduced gestation length. Exposure to Ramadan in the first month of gestation is...

We estimate intergenerational health persistence in the United Kingdom using Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), a broad measure of health derived from the SF-12 Survey. We estimate that both the rank-rank slope and the intergenerational health association (IHA) are 0.21. We use components of...

We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example refers to consumers who transfer the entire balance from an existing credit card account to a new account, but use the new card for...

Traditional measures of intergenerational mobility such as the intergenerational elasticity are not useful for inferences concerning group differences in mobility with respect to the pooled income distribution. This paper uses transition probabilities and measures of “directional rank...

One literature documents a significant, black-white gap in average test scores, while another finds a substantial narrowing of the gap during the 1980's, and stagnation in convergence after. We use two data sources -- the Long Term Trends NAEP and AFQT scores for the universe of applicants to...

Studies of intergenerational mobility have largely ignored health despite the central importance of health to welfare. We present the first estimates of intergenerational health mobility in the US by using repeated measures of self-reported health status (SRH) during adulthood from the PSID. Our...