This paper explores the impact of water quality on mortality by exploiting a natural experiment: the rise of tea consumption in eighteenth century England. This resulted in an unintentional increase in consumption of boiled water, thereby reducing mortality rates. The methodology uses two identification strategies tying areas with lower initial water quality to larger declines in mortality rates after tea drinking became widespread and following larger volumes of tea imports. Results are robust to the inclusion of controls for income and access to trade. The hypothesis is further bolstered by suggestive evidence from cause specific deaths and early childhood mortality.

This paper considers how international migration of the head of household affects the allocation of resources toward boys relative to girls within households remaining in the home country. I address the endogeneity of migration with a differences-in-differences style regression model that compares those households in which migrants have already returned home with those in which migrants are still away. The evidence suggests that while the head of household is away a greater fraction of resources are spent on girls relative to boys, but upon his return, this pattern is reversed.

This paper considers the relationship between adult child international migration and the health outcomes of elderly parents left behind in Mexico. Overall, the evidence suggests that having a migrant child is associated with a higher probability that the elderly parent in Mexico will be in poor physical and mental health. These results call into question the popular view that family members left behind in source countries undoubtedly benefit from the international migration of their relatives.

We present the first quantitative analysis of the impact of ending de jure segregation of Mexican American schoolchildren in the United States by examining the effects of the 1947 Mendez v. Westminster court decision on long-run educational attainment for Hispanics and non-Hispanic Whites in California. Our identification strategy relies on comparing individuals across California counties that vary in their likelihood of segregating and across birth cohorts that vary in their exposure to the Mendez court ruling based on school start age. Results point to a significant increase in educational attainment for Hispanics who were fully exposed to school desegregation.

IN an article published in this review (Antman & Duncan, 2015), we document how racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. A coding error was recently brought to our attention that resulted in 0.55% of our sample being misclassified in terms of their African ancestry.1 We regret and apologize for this error. Although the error affected only a tiny percent of the overall sample, the correction changes the conclusion of how individuals with multiracial African ancestry respond to state affirmative action bans, from a negative and statistically significant effect to a positive and statistically significant effect. The corrected table 3 shows the updated results. The coefficients for college-aged individuals with African ancestry reported in table 5 are also now positive, but are no longer statistically significant at conventional levels. Correcting the error does not change the conclusions for individuals with only African ancestry or no African ancestry. None of the Asian ancestry classifications, and thus none of the results for individuals with Asian ancestry (table 4 and the last two columns of table 5), were affected by the coding error. There are no meaningful changes to the summary statistics in table 2 except in the column for those with multiracial black ancestry. The most notable change is the fraction of individuals with multiracial black ancestry who self-identify as black: 49.37% in the original table and 90.86% in the updated table.2 (For further explanation and a complete set of updated results, see Antman & Duncan, 2019.) We continue to find that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy, albeit with a different conclusion for multiracial blacks, and we are now able to distinguish stronger effects for multiracial individuals with more distant connections to their minority group.This is the original abstract: We link data on racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies to ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. We find that after a state bans affirmative action, multiracial individuals who face an incentive to identify under affirmative action are about 30% less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, multiracial individuals who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action are roughly 20% more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action policies are banned.We modify this original abstract as follows: We link data on racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies to ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. We find that after a state bans affirmative action, multiracial individuals who face an incentive to identify under affirmative action are about 2% to 5% more likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, multiracial individuals who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action are roughly 20% more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action policies are banned.

We link data on racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies to ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. We find that after a state bans affirmative action, multiracial individuals who face an incentive to identify under affirmative action are about 30 percent less likely to identify with their minority groups. In contrast, multiracial individuals who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action are roughly 20 percent more likely to identify with their minority groups once affirmative action policies are banned.

Numerous studies find that U.S.-born Hispanics differ significantly from non-Hispanic whites on important measures of human capital, including health. Nevertheless, almost all studies rely on subjective measures of ethnic self-identification to identify immigrants' U.S.-born descendants. This can lead to bias due to “ethnic attrition,” which occurs whenever a U.S.-born descendant of a Hispanic immigrant fails to self-identify as Hispanic. This paper shows that Mexican American ethnic attritors are generally more likely to display health outcomes closer to those of non-Hispanic whites. This biases conventional estimates of Mexican American health away from suggesting patterns of assimilation and convergence with non-Hispanic whites.