This paper examines impacts of childhood health on socioeconomic status (SES) outcomes observed during adulthood: levels and trajectories of education, family income, household wealth, individual earnings, and labor supply. The analysis is conducted using panel data that collect these SES measures using a sample who were originally children and are now well into their adult years. Since all siblings are in the panel, unmeasured family and neighborhood background effects can be controlled for. With the exception of education, poor childhood health has a quantitatively large effect on all of these outcomes. Moreover, these estimated effects are larger when unobserved family effects are controlled.

A probabilistic discovery model modified after Kaufman's earlier model is simplified to reduce computational demands and to reduce the sensitivity of the resulting estimates. The model is applied to the North Sea to estimate remaining oil reserves and forecast future discoveries. The simplification jeopardizes some informational detail, but the errors and approximations inherent in historical data sometimes overvalue the available information. A broader categorization scheme helps to control errors in this case. The model uses a stochastic production function based on a timing relationship between exploratory efforts and reservoir discovery and on a dynamic relationship of productivity and resource depletion. 21 references, 4 tables. (DCK)

In a macroeconomic model with drifting long-run inflation expectations, the anchoring of inflation expectations manifests in two testable predictions. First, expectations about inflation far in the future should no longer respond to news about current inflation. Second, better anchored inflation expectations weaken the relationship between unemployment and inflation, flattening the reduced-form Phillips curve. We evaluate both predictions and find that the Federal Reserve’s communication of a numerical inflation objective, first through its Summary of Economic Projections and later through the announcement of a 2% target in 2012, better anchored inflation expectations. Moreover, inflation expectations in the United States have remained anchored amid the volatility of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, similar analysis reveals no evidence of anchoring in Japan despite the adoption of a numerical inflation target.

We study the effects of prenatal exposure to violent crime on infant health, using New York City crime records linked to mothers' addresses in birth records data. We address endogeneity of assault exposure with three strategies and find that in utero assault exposure significantly increases the incidence of adverse birth outcomes. We calculate that the annual social cost of assault during pregnancy in the United States is more than $3.8 billion. Since infant health predicts long-term wellbeing and disadvantaged women are disproportionately likely to be domestic abuse victims, violence in utero may be an important channel for intergenerational transmission of inequality.

The H-1B Visa Reform Act of 2004 dictates an annual allocation of 85,000 visas with 20,000 reserved for advanced-degree applicants. We represent the main requirements of this legislation as formal axioms and characterize visa allocation rules consistent with the axioms. Despite the precise number reserved, we show that the range of implementations satisfying these axioms can change the allocation of advanced-degree visas by as much as 14,000 in an average year. Of all rules satisfying these axioms, the 2019 rule imposed by executive order is most favorable to advanced-degree holders. However, two earlier modifications resulted in larger changes, possibly unintentionally.

Using a unique set of household level panel data, we estimate the effect of capital gains on saving by asset type, controlling for observable and unobservable household specific fixed effects. The results suggest that the decline in the personal saving rate since 1984 is largely due to the significant capital gains in corporate equities experienced over this period. Over five-year periods, the effect of capital gains in corporate equities on saving is substantially larger than the effect of capital gains in housing or other assets. Failure to differentiate wealth affects across asset types results in a significant understatement or overstatement of the size of their impact, depending on the asset.

V. Kerry Smith, Raymond B. Palmquist, Paul Jakus, Combining Farrell Frontier and Hedonic Travel Cost Models for Valuing Estuarine Quality, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Nov., 1991), pp. 694-699

We use newly linked tax records to show that the large responses of UK company owner-managers to personal taxes are due to intertemporal income shifting and not to reductions in real business activity. Around half of this shifting is short-term and helps prevent volatile incomes being taxed more heavily under progressive personal taxes. The remainder reflects systemic profit retention over long periods to take advantage of lower tax rates, including preferential treatment of capital gains. We find no evidence that this tax-induced retention increases business investment. It does, however, substantially reduce the tax revenue raised from high income business owners.

Many development programs that attempt to disseminate improved technologies are limited in duration because of external funding constraints or an assumption of impact sustainability, but there is limited evidence on whether and when terminating such programs is efficient. We provide novel experimental evidence on the impacts of a randomized phaseout of an agricultural extension and subsidy program that promotes improved inputs and cultivation practices among smallholder women farmers in Uganda. We find that phaseout does not diminish the use of either practices or inputs as farmers shift purchases from NGO-sponsored village-based supply networks to market sources. These results indicate that short-term interventions can suffice to trigger persistent effects, consistent with models of technology adoption that emphasize learning from experience.

This paper reports the first effort to use data to evaluate how new information, acquired through exogenous health shocks, affects people's longevity expectations. We find that smokers react differently to health shocks than do those who quit smoking or never smoked. These differences, together with insights from qualitative research conducted along with the statistical analysis, suggest specific changes in the health warnings used to reduce smoking. Our specific focus is on how current smokers responded to health information in comparison to former smokers and nonsmokers. The three groups use significantly different updating rules to revise their assessments about longevity. The most significant finding of our study documents that smokers differ from persons who do not smoke in how information influences their personal longevity expectations. When smokers experience smoking-related health shocks, they interpret this information as reducing their chances of living to age 75 or more. Our estimated models imply smokers update their longevity expectations more dramatically than either former smokers or those who never smoked. Smokers are thus assigning a larger risk equivalent to these shocks. They do not react comparably to general health shocks, implying that specific information about smoking-related health events is most likely to cause them to update beliefs. It remains to be evaluated whether messages can be designed that focus on the link between smoking and health outcomes in ways that will have comparable effects on smokers' risk perceptions.