Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that paternal unemployment has a surprisingly positive causal effect on the “Big 5” personality traits of children aged 17 to 25. In particular, our results from longitudinal value-added models for personality suggest that paternal unemployment makes children significantly more conscientious and less neurotic. Our resu...

War and Stature: Growing Up During the Nigerian Civil War The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated southeastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity and cohort, we identify significant long run i...

In this article, we address the long-run associations between childhood shocks and health in late adulthood. Applying a life-course approach and data from SHARE, we estimate direct and indirect relations of shocks like relocation, dispossession, or hunger and health outcomes after 50 years of age. Having lived in a children's home, in a foster family, or having suffered a period of hunger turn ...

This article offers a theory of economic growth, stagnation, and demo-economic transition that originates from external effects of childbearing, health expenditure, and education under endogenous mortality. Facing a hierarchy of needs, parents always consume and want to have a family. Child quality, measured as a two-dimensional vector of child health and schooling, becomes only affordable when...

This paper attempts to disentangle the direct effects of experience from those of culture in determining fertility. We use the GSS to examine the fertility of women born in the US but from different ethnic backgrounds. We take lagged values of the total fertility rate in the woman’s country of ancestry as the cultural proxy and use the woman’s number of siblings to capture her direct family exp...

Almost 50 years after domestic US family planning programs began, their effects on childbearing remain controversial. Using the county-level roll-out of these programs from 1964 to 1973, this paper reevaluates their shorter and longer term effects on US fertility rates. I find that the introduction of family planning is associated with significant and persistent reductions in fertility driven b...

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents’ input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return innovation production can also lead agents with varying skill levels perform differentially under different contracts. We study this experimentally, observing verifying inputs outputs Indian maternity care. find that both contract types achieve compa...

While a growing literature shows that women, relative to men, prefer greater investment in children, it is unclear whether empowering women produces better economic outcomes. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation US suffrage laws, we show exposure during childhood led large increases educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially Blacks and Southern Whites. We...

We study targeted lockdowns in a multigroup SIR model where infection, hospitalization, and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular the “young,” “middle-aged,” “old.” Our enables tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy. For baseline parameter values for COVID-19 pandemic applied to US, we find that policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform uni...

the hypothesis which more educated women experience less fertility has motivated many researches. current study is also carried out in the same direction of those investigations. the theoretical model is designed based on microeconomics of fertility that show since the substitution effect of rising female schooling surpasses the income effect, the presence of negative relation between the level...