Minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) laws are known to reduce alcohol consumption among young adults. One additional benefit of higher MLDAs may be that they improve health outcomes among infants born to young mothers. We estimate the impact of MLDAs on infant health in the USA by comparing birth...

Top economists provide much-needed guidance--and some surprising conclusions--in response to rising public concerns about inequality in the U.S. tax system.

Children who grow up in more highly educated families have better labor market outcomes as adults than those who grow up in less educated families, but we do not know whether this is because education bestows parents with skills that make them better parents or because unobservable endowments...

The English Old Poor Law, which before 1834 provided welfare to the elderly, children, the improvident, and the unfortunate, was a bête noire of the new discipline of Political Economy. Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Ricardo all demanded its abolition. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, drafted...

This paper uses variation induced by firm closures to explore the intergenerational effects of worker displacement. Using a Canadian panel of administrative data that follows almost 60,000 father-child pairs from 1978 to 1999 and includes detailed information about the firms at which the father...

The strong correlation between parents’ economic status and that of their children has been well-documented, but little is known about the extent to which this is a causal phenomenon. This paper attempts to improve our understanding of the causal processes that contribute to intergenerational...

The goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the United States is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low income families. A large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) has accomplished this goal, but...

Top economists provide much-needed guidance--and some surprising conclusions--in response to rising public concerns about inequality in the U.S. tax system.

The goal of federal food and nutrition programs in the United States is to improve the nutritional well-being and health of low income families. A large body of literature evaluates the extent to which the Supplemental Program for Women Infants and Children (WIC) has accomplished this goal, but...