the fetal origins hypothesis in finance prenatal environment the gender gap and investor behavior we find that differences in individuals prenatal environments explain heterogeneity in financial decisions later in life an exogenous increase in exposure to prenatal testosterone is associated with the masculinization of financial behavior specifically with elevated risk taking and trading in adulthood we also examine birth weight those with higher birth weight are more likely to participate in the stock market whereas those with lower birth weight tend to prefer portfolios with higher volatility and skewness consistent with compensatory behavior our results contribute to the understanding of how the prenatal environment shapes an individual s behavior in financial markets later in life received may 2 2014 accepted september 30 2015 by editor david hirshleifer

guidelines for exploiting natural resource wealth the principles of how best to manage the various components of national wealth are outlined where the permanent income hypothesis the hotelling rule and the hartwick rule play a prominent role as far as managing natural resource wealth is concerned a case is made to use an intergenerational sovereign wealth fund to smooth consumption across generations a liquidity fund for the precautionary buffers to deal with commodity price volatility and an investment fund to park part of the windfall until the country is ready to absorb extra spending on domestic investment capital scarcity implies that a positive part of the windfall should be spent on domestic investment the conclusions highlight the political economy problems that will have to be tackled with these normative proposals for managing wealth the author 2014 published by oxford university press

exploring the intergenerational persistence of mental health evidence from three generations this paper uses data from the 1970 british cohort study to quantify the intergenerational persistence of mental health and the long run economic costs associated with poor parental mental health we find a strong and significant intergenerational correlation that is robust to different covariate sets sample restrictions model specifications and potential endogeneity importantly the intergenerational persistence is economically relevant with maternal mental health associated with lasting effects on the child s educational attainment future household income and the probability of having criminal convictions these results do not disappear after controlling for children s own childhood and adulthood mental health

economic growth comparative advantage and gender differences in schooling outcomes evidence from the birthweight differences of chinese twins abstract data from two surveys of twins in china are used to contribute to an improved understanding of the role of economic development in affecting gender differences in the trends in levels of and returns to schooling observed in china and in many developing countries in recent decades in particular we explore the hypothesis that these phenomena reflect differences in comparative advantage with respect to skill and brawn between men and women in the context of changes in incomes returns to skill and or nutritional improvements that are the result of economic development and growth

violence and birth outcomes evidence from homicides in brazil abstract this paper uses microdata from brazilian vital statistics on births and deaths between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in utero exposure to local violence measured by homicide rates on birth outcomes the estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of pregnancy leads to a small but precisely estimated increase in the risk of low birthweight and prematurity effects are found both in small municipalities where homicides are rare and in large municipalities where violence is endemic and are particularly pronounced among children of poorly educated mothers implying that violence compounds the disadvantage that these children already suffer as a result of their households lower socioeconomic status

endowments at birth and parents investments in children do parents invest more in higher quality children or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments we answer this question in the context of a large scale iodine supplementation programme in tanzania we find that children with higher programme exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunised fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected

can targeted transfers improve birth outcomes evidence from the introduction of the wic program abstract 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 most studies have been based on research designs that compare program participants to non participants if selection into these programs is non random then such comparisons will lead to biased estimates of the program s true effects in this study we use the rollout of the wic program across counties to estimate the impact of the program on infant health we find that the implementation of wic led to an increase in average birth weight and a decrease in the fraction of births that are classified as low birth weight we find no evidence that these estimates are driven by changes in fertility or selection into live births our preferred estimates suggest that wic initiation raised average birth weight by 2 g or by 7 g among infants born to mothers with low education levels these translate into estimated birth weight increases among participating mothers of approximately 18 to 29 g estimated treatments on the treated impacts among infants born to participating mothers with low education are of similar magnitude

environment health and human capital in this review we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well being first in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior particularly in the form of residential sorting can lead to nonrandom assignment of pollution economists have employed a wide range of quasi experimental techniques to develop causal estimates of the effect of pollution second economic research has placed a considerable focus on the role of avoidance behavior which is an important component for understanding the difference between biological and behavioral effects of pollution and for proper welfare calculations lastly economic research has expanded the focus of analysis beyond traditional health outcomes to include measures of human capital including labor supply productivity and cognition our review of the quasi experimental evidence on this topic suggests that pollution does indeed have a wide range of effects on individual well being even at levels well below current regulatory standards given the importance of health and human capital as an engine for economic growth these findings underscore the role of environmental conditions as an important factor of production jel i12 i31 j24 q51 q53

the costs of low birth weight birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy this is because low birth weight lbw infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society but would the prevention of lbw generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements estimates of the return to lbwprevention from cross sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy such as genetic factors to address this we compare the hospital costs health at birth and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the united states we also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy the leading risk factor for lbw in the united states on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of lbw than previously thought suggesting two possibilities 1 existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of lbw by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20 or 2 different lbw preventing interventions have different health and cost consequences implying that policy efforts that presume a single return to reducing lbw will necessarily be suboptimal

has democratization reduced infant mortality in sub saharan africa evidence from micro data does democracy help babies survive in sub saharan africa by using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 28 african countries i compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after democratization to disentangle the effect of democracy from that of changes in population characteristics which is infeasible with country level statistics on infant mortality i find that infant mortality falls by 1 2 percentage points 12 of the sample mean after democratization in the post cold war period relevant aspects of democracy appear to be the combination of multiparty elections and leadership change

voting technology political responsiveness and infant health evidence from brazil this paper studies the introduction of electronic voting technology in brazilian elections estimates exploiting a regression discontinuity design indicate that electronic voting reduced residual error ridden and uncounted votes and promoted a large de facto enfranchisement of mainly less educated citizens estimates exploiting the unique pattern of the technology s phase in across states over time suggest that as predicted by political economy models it shifted government spending toward health care which is particularly beneficial to the poor positive effects on both the utilization of health services prenatal visits and newborn health low weight births are also found for less educated mothers but not for the more educated

focusing firm evolution the impact of information infrastructure on market entry by u s telecommunications companies 1984 1998 organization structure acts as a lens on the environment gathering information and shaping its flow through a firm to inform managers choices this shaping of information flow happens through an organization s operating units which selectively process information from the environment and through the links between them which pass information between units we explore the relationship between this information infrastructure and firm strategy using structure and service information from the eight largest telephone service providers in the united states from 1984 to 1998 we find that firms with more units that scan areas of opportunity are more likely to enter a market while firms with more units that scan nonfocal areas are less likely to enter the market we also find that personnel links between units and the corporate level of the firm often constrain entry to new markets by dampening a unit s appetite for risk personnel links between operating units on the other hand can make a firm more likely to enter new markets particularly when the cooperating units combine different sets of information thus a firm s information infrastructure plays a dual role in shaping firm evolution leading toward some paths and away from others

all for one family size and children s educational distribution under credit constraints this paper examines the possibility that a child s years of schooling could increase in the number of siblings instead of being diminished by competition for parents resources if unable to finance the education of their younger children parents may do so through their older children s labor income we examine this possibility in a model combining convex returns to education and credit constraints our model predicts correlations among family size years of schooling and birth order which would not exist when either of these two elements is absent empirical patterns shown in the united states mexico and south korea support the model predictions

from the cradle to the labor market the effect of birth weight on adult outcomes lower birth weight babies have worse outcomes both short run in terms of one year mortality rates and longer run in terms of educational attainment and earnings however recent research has called into question whether birth weight itself is important or whether it simply reflects other hard to measure characteristics by applying within twin techniques using an unusually rich dataset from norway we examine the effects of birth weight on both short run and long run outcomes for the same cohorts we find that birth weight does matter despite short run twin fixed effects estimates that are much smaller than ols estimates the effects on longer run outcomes such as adult height iq earnings and education are significant and similar in magnitude to ols estimates

early life health interventions and academic achievement this paper studies the effect of improved early life health care on mortality and long run academic achievement in school we use the idea that medical treatments often follow rules of thumb for assigning care to patients such as the classification of very low birth weight vlbw which assigns infants special care at a specific birth weight cutoff using detailed administrative data on schooling and birth records from chile and norway we establish that children who receive extra medical care at birth have lower mortality rates and higher test scores and grades in school these gains are in the order of 0 15 0 22 standard deviations

religion religiosity and educational attainment evidence from the compulsory education system in england this paper investigates the effect of religion on the educational attainment of pupils in their final year of compulsory education in england the results show that pupils that identify with any re

mother s education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital evidence from college openings we examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1999 we also assess the importance of four channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes use of prenatal care smoking marriage and fertility in an effort to account for the endogeneity of education attainment we use data about the availability of colleges in the womans country in her 17th year as an instrument for maternal education we find that higher maternal education improves infant health as measured by birth weight and gestational age it also increases the probability that a new mother is married reduces parity increases use of prenatal care and reduces smoking suggesting that may be important pathways for the ultimate effect on health our results add to the growing body of literature which suggests that estimates of the returns to education which focus only on increases in wages understate the total return

endogenous altruism theory and evidence from chinese twins this paper studies the endogenous formation of intersibling altruism the theory suggests that parental incentive to foster children s fraternal love is positively related to efficiency gains from

on the origins of risk taking in financial markets risk taking in financial markets is highly correlated between parents and their children however little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors we use data on stock market participation of swedish adoptees and relate this to the investment behavior of both their biological and adoptive parents we find that stock market participation of parents increases that of children by about 34 and that both pre birth and post birth factors are important however once we condition on having positive financial wealth we find that nurture has a much stronger influence on risk taking by children and the evidence of a relationship between stock holding of biological parents and their adoptive children becomes weaker we find similar results when we study the share of financial wealth that is invested in stocks this suggests that a substantial proportion of the transmission of risk behavior from parents to children is environmentally determined

stature skills and adult life outcomes evidence from indonesia abstractwe investigate the effect of height on earnings occupational choices and a subjective measure of wellbeing among indonesian men we explore the extent to which height captures the effects of endowments set before entry in the labour market physical and cognitive skills co determined with stature early in life do not explain much of the height earnings premium directly yet human capital more broadly including cognition educational attainment and other factors related to childhood conditions explains around half of the height premium and does so through occupational sorting indeed taller workers tend to have more education and educated workers tend to work in more lucrative occupations that require brain and social skills not brawn the unexplained share of the height earnings premium may reflect a specific role of stature on social interaction labour market advantages or self assurance we also find a height premium in happiness half of which simply accounts for the educational and e

a test of exogeneity without instrumental variables in models with bunching this paper presents a test of the exogeneity of a single explanatory variable in a multivariate model it does not require the exogeneity of the other regressors or the existence of instrumental variables the fundamental maintained assumption is that the model must be continuous in the explanatory variable of interest this test has power when unobservable confounders are discontinuous with respect to the explanatory variable of interest and it is particularly suitable for applications in which that variable has bunching points an application of the test to the problem of estimating the effects of maternal smoking in birth weight shows evidence of remaining endogeneity even after controlling for the most complete covariate specification in the literature

health at birth parental investments and academic outcomes this paper explores the relationship among health at birth academic outcomes and the potential role of parental investments using administrative panel data from chile using detailed data on pare

inequality at birth some causes and consequences recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors including maternal education behaviors and participation in social programs in turn endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes and of the outcomes of future generations exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention a large literature outside of economics advocates for environmental justice and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards i provide new evidence on this question showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities i estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6 of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

drought of opportunities contemporaneous and long term impacts of rainfall shocks on human capital higher wages are generally thought to increase human capital production particularly in the developing world we introduce a simple model of human capital production in which investments and time allocation differ by age using data on test scores and schooling from rural india we show that higher wages increase human capital investment in early life in utero to age 2 but decrease human capital from age 5 to 16 children switch out of school into productive work when rainfall is higher the opportunity cost of schooling even for fairly young children is an important factor in determining overall human capital investment

poor little rich kids the role of nature versus nurture in wealth and other economic outcomes and behaviors wealth is highly correlated between parents and their children however little is known about the extent to which these relationships are genetic or determined by environmental factors we use administrative data on the net wealth of a large sample of swedish adoptees merged with similar information for their biological and adoptive parents comparing the relationship between the wealth of adopted and biological parents and that of the adopted child we find that even prior to any inheritance there is a substantial role for environment and a much smaller role for pre birth factors and we find little evidence that nature nurture interactions are important when bequests are taken into account the role of adoptive parental wealth becomes much stronger our findings suggest that wealth transmission is not primarily because children from wealthier families are inherently more talented or more able but that even in relatively egalitarian sweden wealth begets wealth we further build on the existing literature by providing a more comprehensive view of the role of nature and nurture on intergenerational mobility looking at a wide range of different outcomes using a common sample and method we find that environmental influences are relatively more important for wealth related variables such as savings and investment decisions than for human capital we conclude by studying consumption as an overall measure of welfare and find that like wealth it is more determined by environment than by biology

collateral damage the german food crisis educational attainment and labor market outcomes of german post war cohorts using the german 1970 census to study educational and labor market outcomes of cohorts born during the german food crisis after world war ii i document that those born between november 1945 and may 1946 have significantly lower educational attainment and occupational status than cohorts born shortly before or after several alternative explanations for this finding are tested most likely a short spell of severe undernutrition around the end of the war has impaired intrauterine conditions in early pregnancies and resulted in long term detriments among the affected cohorts this conjecture is corroborated by evidence from austria

bridging the gap for roma the effects of an ethnically targeted program on prenatal care and child health abstract this study uses quasi experimental variation from a public health program implemented in romania that targeted roma europe s largest and most disadvantaged ethnic minority the program employed health mediators to increase the provision of information about already existing free of charge health services available for children and pregnant women we find that in rural areas the program led to large increases in prenatal care take up rates but no improvements in children s health at birth however we find significant reductions in infant mortality caused by perinatal complications

intrafamily resource allocations a dynamic structural model of birth weight using large american and british survey data this paper provides structural estimates of the production functions for birth weight and fetal growth in addition to maternal smoking we estimate the impact of when a mother stops work which has not been considered in the literature mothers work interruptions of up to 3 months before birth have a positive effect on birth outcomes especially among british children parental behavior appears to respond to child idiosyncratic endowments in a way that suggests that parents have inequity aversion concerns evidence in favor of inequity aversion emerges also from the analysis of breast feeding decisions

long run effects of gestation during the dutch hunger winter famine on labor market and hospitalization outcomes the dutch hunger winter 1944 45 is the most studied famine in the literature on long run effects of malnutrition in utero its temporal and spatial demarcations are clear it was severe it was not anticipated and nutritional conditions in society were favorable and stable before and after the famine this is the first study to analyze effects of in utero exposure on labor market outcomes and hospitalization late in life and the first to use register data covering the full dutch population to examine long run effects of this famine we provide results of famine exposure by sub interval of gestation we find a significantly negative effect of exposure during the first trimester of gestation on employment outcomes 53 or more years after birth hospitalization rates in the years before retirement are higher after middle or late gestational exposure

friends or family revisiting the effects of high school popularity on adult earnings recent evidence has suggested links between high school popularity and wages during mid life using the wisconsin longitudinal study this article revisits this question by first replicating the results using an alternative dataset that is very similar in structure similar to previous results the add health baseline effects suggest that an additional high school friendship nomination is linked to a 2 increase in earnings around age 30 however leveraging the unique structure of the add health shows that sibling comparisons eliminate any associations between popularity and earnings the findings suggest that families rather than friends may be the cause of the association

early childhood nutrition schooling and sibling inequality in a dynamic context evidence from south africa abstract this article examines the effects of early childhood nutrition on schooling investments and outcomes to assess the dynamic nature of human capital production using panel data from south africa height for age z score is used as a measure of health and nutritional status in early childhood based on a comparison of siblings the empirical analysis shows that improving children s health significantly lowers the age when they start school increases grade attainment decreases grade repetition and improves learning performance in the early stage of schooling however the observed effect diminishes as a child ages which implies that i height at ages earlier than three better explains subsequent schooling outcomes and or ii the role of health capital changes from one schooling stage to another

long run impacts of childhood access to the safety net a growing economics literature establishes a causal link between in utero shocks and health and human capital in adulthood most studies rely on extreme negative shocks such as famine and pandemics we are the first to examine the impact of a positive and policy driven change in economic resources available in utero and during childhood in particular we focus on the introduction of a key element of the u s safety net the food stamp program which was rolled out across counties in the u s between 1961 and 1975 we use the panel study of income dynamics to assemble unique data linking family background and county of residence in early childhood to adult health and economic outcomes the identification comes from variation across counties and over birth cohorts in availability of the food stamp program our findings indicate that the food stamp program has effects decades after initial exposure specifically access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of metabolic syndrome obesity high blood pressure and diabetes and for women an increase in economic self sufficiency overall our results suggest substantial internal and external benefits of the safety net that have not previously been quantified

blowing up money the earnings penalty of smoking in the 1970s and the 21st century abstract we analyze the earnings penalty of smoking among swedish twins in two social contexts the 1970s when smoking was common and widely accepted and when there were relatively few tobacco laws aiming to reduce smoking and the 2000s when smoking had become more expensive stigmatizing and less common and when tobacco laws and regulations had intensified the results show that the short term earnings penalty of smoking was much higher in the 21st century than in the 1970s for men for women smokers had on average higher annual earnings compared to nonsmokers in the 1970s but lower annual earnings in the 2000s in the long run there was an earnings gap for men between never smokers and continuous smokers whereas there was a pronounced earnings bonus of smoking cessation for women the results emphasize the importance of social context and the long term horizon when evaluating the consequences of smoking for earnings

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

height skills and labor market outcomes in mexico abstract taller workers are paid higher wages a prominent explanation for this pattern is that physical growth and cognitive development share childhood inputs inducing a correlation between adult height and two productive skills strength and intelligence this paper explores the relative roles of strength and intelligence in explaining the labor market height premium among mexican men while cognitive test scores account for a limited share of the height premium roughly half of the premium can be attributed to the educational and occupational choices of taller workers taller workers obtain more education and sort into occupations with greater intelligence requirements and lower strength requirements suggesting a possible role for cognitive skill

health returns to modern heating evidence from china this study analyses the health effects of modern heating using china s centralized home heating infrastructure as a natural experiment the underlying health mechanism is that the recipients of mo

the effects of poor neonatal health on children s cognitive development we make use of a new data resource merged birth and school records for all children born in florida from 1992 to 2002 to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed effects models we find that the effects of early health on cognitive development are essentially constant through the school career that these effects are similar across a wide range of family backgrounds and that they are invariant to measures of school quality we conclude that the effects of early health on adult outcomes are therefore set very early

priceless the nonpecuniary benefits of schooling copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 by the american economic association permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of american economic association publications for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not distributed for profit or direct commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation including the name of the author copyrights for components of this work owned by others than aea must be honored abstracting with credit is permitted the author has the right to republish post on servers redistribute to lists and use any component of this work in other works for others to do so requires prior specific permission and or a fee permissions may be requested from the american economic association administrative office by going to the contact us form and choosing copyright permissions request from the menu copyright 2016 aea

the brain drain and the world distribution of income abstract skilled emigration or brain drain from developing to developed countries is becoming the dominant pattern of international migration today such migration is likely to affect the world distribution of income both directly through the mobility of people and indirectly as the prospect of migration affects the rate of return to education in both the sending and receiving economies this migration pattern will therefore affect human capital accumulation and fertility decisions in both the sending and receiving economies this paper analyzes these effects in a dynamic two country model of the world economy where agents in both countries make optimal fertility and human capital decisions the implications of the analysis for the world distribution of income are derived in the light of recent empirical findings of the brain drain literature the analysis shows that the current trend towards predominantly skilled emigration from poor to rich countries may in the long run increase inequality in the world distribution of income as relatively poor countries grow large in terms of population in the short run however it is possible for world inequality to fall due to rises in gdp per capita in large developing economies with sufficiently low skilled emigration rates

long term impacts of exposure to high temperatures on human capital and economic productivity abstract weather anomalies have a range of adverse contemporaneous impacts on health and socio economic outcomes this paper tests if temperature anomalies around the time of birth can have long term impacts on individuals economic productivity using unique data sets on historical weather and earnings place and date of birth of all 1 5 million formal employees in ecuador we find that individuals who have experienced in utero temperatures that are 1 c above average are less educated and earn about 0 7 less as adults results are robust to alternative specifications and falsification tests and suggest that warming may have already caused adverse long term economic impacts

wic in your neighborhood new evidence on the impacts of geographic access to clinics a large body of evidence indicates that conditions in utero and health at birth matter for individuals long run outcomes suggesting potential value in programs aimed at pregnant women and young children this paper uses a novel identification strategy and data from birth and administrative records over 2005 2009 to provide causal estimates of the effects of geographic access to the special supplemental nutrition program for women infants and children wic my empirical approach uses within zip code variation in wic clinic presence together with maternal fixed effects and accounts for the potential endogeneity of mobility gestational age bias and measurement error in gestation i find that access to wic increases food benefit take up pregnancy weight gain birth weight and the probability of breastfeeding initiation at the time of hospital discharge the estimated effects are strongest for mothers with a high school education or less who are most likely eligible for wic services

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

the effect of child health insurance access on schooling evidence from public insurance expansions although a sizable literature analyzes the effects of public health insurance programs on short run health outcomes little prior work has examined their long term effects we examine the effects of public insurance expansions among children in the 1980s and 1990s on their future educational attainment we find that expanding health insurance coverage for low income children increases the rate of high school and college completion these estimates are robust to only using federal medicaid expansions and mostly are due to expansions that occur when the children are not newborns our results indicate that the long run benefits of public health insurance are substantial

height and earnings the role of cognitive and noncognitive skills we use large scale register data on 450 000 swedish males who underwent mandatory military enlistment at age 18 and a subsample of 150 000 siblings to examine why tall people earn more we show the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as family background and muscular strength for the height earnings relationship in addition we show that a substantial height premium remains after these factors have been accounted for which originates from very short people having low earnings this is mostly explained by the sorting of short people into low paid occupations which may indicate discrimination by stature

inside the war on poverty the impact of food stamps on birth outcomes this paper evaluates the health impacts of a signature initiative of the war on poverty the introduction of the modern food stamp pro gram fsp using variation in the month fsp began operating in each u s county we find that pregnancies exposed to fsp three months prior to birth yielded deliveries with increased birth weight with the largest gains at the lowest birth weights we also find small but statistically insig nificant improvements in neonatal mortality we conclude that the sizable increase in income from fsp improved birth outcomes for both whites and african americans with larger impacts for african american mothers n this paper we evaluate the health consequences of a sizable improvement in the resources available to ameri ca s poorest in particular we examine the impact of the food stamp program fsp which in 2007 provided 34 billion in payments to about 13 million households on infant health our paper makes two distinct contributions first although the goal of the fsp is to increase the nutri tion of the poor few papers have examined its impact on health outcomes second building on work by hoynes and schanzenbach 2009 we argue that the fsp treatment represents an exogenous increase in income for the poor our analysis therefore represents a causal estimate of the impact of income on health an important topic with little convincing evidence due to concerns about endogeneity and reverse causality currie 2009 we use the natural experiment afforded by the nation wide rollout of the modern fsp during the 1960s and early 1970s our identification strategy uses the sharp timing of the county by county rollout of the fsp which was initially constrained by congressional funding authorizations and ultimately became available in all counties by 1975 speci fically we use information on the month the fsp began operating in each of the roughly 3 100 u s counties and examine the impact of the fsp rollout on mean birth weight low birth weight gestation and neonatal mortality throughout the history of the fsp the program para meters have been set by the u s department of agriculture usda and are uniform across states in the absence of the state level variation often leveraged by economists to eval uate transfer programs previous fsp research has typically resorted to strong assumptions as to the comparability of fsp participants and eligible nonparticipants currie 2003 not surprisingly the literature is far from settled as to what casual impact if any the fsp has on nutrition and health hoynes and schanzenbach 2009 use this county rollout to examine the impact of the fsp on food consumption using the psid they found that the introduction of the fsp increased total food spending and decreased out of pocket food spending importantly consistent with the predictions of canonical microeconomic theory the magnitude of the increase in food expenditures was similar to an equivalent sized income transfer implying that most recipient house holds were inframarginal that is they would spend more on the subsidized good than the face value of the in kind transfer as one of the largest antipoverty programs in the united states comparable in cost to the earned income tax credit eitc and substantially larger than temporary assistance to needy families tanf understanding fsp effects is valuable both in its own right and for what it reveals about the relationship between income and health 1

the health influence on returns to education in brazil a nonlinear approach abstract this paper investigates the returns to education in terms of individuals health in brazil we use the heckman procedure 1979 and a nonlinear model that allows the consideration of the existence of increasing returns the study employs microdata from national survey by household sample for 2003 and 2008 the health status is measured by self assessment of individuals we determine that the rate of returns decreases until the fourth and fifth years of schooling that is until the completion of primary education when increasing returns start the evidence also indicates that the rate of return to education is lower for individuals in poor health for people with 15 or more years of schooling the rate of return is 10 14 5 lower for those who are unhealthy

born with a silver spoon danish evidence on wealth inequality in childhood we study wealth inequality in childhood using danish wealth records from three decades while teenagers have some earnings we estimate that transfers account for at least 50 percent of wealth at age 18 and much more so for the rich children inheritance from grandparents does not appear quantitatively important but we do find evidence that children receive inter vivos transfers while wealth holdings are small in childhood they have strong predictive power for future wealth in adulthood asset holdings at age 18 are more informative than parental wealth in predicting wealth of children many years later when they are in their 40s hence childhood wealth reveals significant heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of wealth which is not simply captured by parental wealth alone we investigate why this is the case and rule out that childhood wealth in itself can accumulate enough to explain later wealth inequality our evidence indicates that childhood wealth is a proxy for a broad set of circumstances related to intergenerational transmission and future wealth accumulation including savings investment behavior and additional transfers

birth weight in the long run we study the effect of birth weight on long run outcomes using data on swedish twins born between 1926 and 1958 linked to administrative records spanning entire life time labor market histories we

the contribution of early life versus labour market factors to intergenerational income persistence a comparison of the uk and sweden we explore whether differences in intergenerational income mobility between the uk and sweden show up early in life finding stronger associations between parental income and birthweight height and school performance in the uk we investigate whether these differentials can account for the country difference in income mobility while differences in the associations in birthweight and height are too weak to matter school performance does account for a substantial part of this difference however country differences in the earnings returns to these skills are at least as important as the differences in the link between parental income and skills