This paper investigates the long-term consequences of early-life exposure to the 1910–1911 Manchurian Plague, an epidemic with a near 100
This paper examines the intergenerational effects of the Food Stamp Program (FSP) on fertility and marriage in the United States. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we leverage the initial roll-out of the Food Stamp Program in the 1960s and 1970s to examine the future family formation decisions of individuals born between 1955 and 1981. The results suggest that exposure to the program has different effects on fertility and marriage based on age and gender. For men, increased exposure to the program reduces fertility at older ages, particularly for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, with limited effects on marriage. Among women, we find no statistically significant effects of increased exposure to FSP on fertility and marriage. Our study builds on a growing literature that considers the intergenerational impacts of public policies that increase childhood economic resources.
When does social hierarchy break down? Can social status acquired during peacetime affect the structure of mortality in prisoner societies facing long-term existential threat? We study two distinct Holocaust settings: the Theresienstadt ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. We find that social status provided substantial survival protection in the partially self-administered prisoner society of Theresienstadt, where it was as helpful for women as for men, even under high survival pressure. However, social status was no longer effective in supporting survival in Auschwitz, where there was no semblance of prisoner self-administration.
This paper constructs a new annual panel for 14 Western countries over 1800–2016, linking homicide to alcohol consumption (by beverage type), drug offenses, deterrence, and education. The central innovation is the first harmonized long-run cross-country alcohol series that can be aligned with the major historical waves in lethal violence. Across graphical evidence, narratives, and multivariate panel regressions, homicide co-moves strongly with alcohol, while education, deterrence, and demography capture the broader institutional context. We interpret the estimates as suggestive long-run relationships and use them for a multivariate historical accounting of the post-war crime wave and subsequent decline.
This paper investigates the impacts of housing purchase restrictions on internal migration and household tenure choices in Chinese cities. We develop a spatial model that incorporates individuals’ migration and tenure decisions across cities. The model predicts that potentially affected homebuyers will either switch destinations or change tenure choices, depending on heterogeneous city characteristics. Utilizing the China Migrants Dynamic Survey and a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the model’s implications and find that the restrictions lead to a decrease in migration inflows and a reduced proportion of homeowners among migrants in the restricted cities relative to the unrestricted ones. However, this overall pattern masks important heterogeneity across cities: incoming migrants are more likely to adjust their tenure choices when restricted cities offer better development prospects or desirable living conditions, and they are more inclined to relocate to alternative destinations when such attributes are lacking. These findings highlight the importance of considering unintended consequences on migration when designing housing policies.
Children who start school at a younger age are more likely to receive pharmacological treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This pattern is widely attributed to peer-comparison biases, but the relative importance of different underlying mechanisms remains debated. We use administrative data from England to study how school starting age affects ADHD prescription rates from ages 5 to 15. Exploiting a sharp school-entry cutoff and comparing children born just before and after September 1, we estimate both age- and grade-specific effects of early school entry. We find that early starters are 40–50
Age at first birth has increased over time, which is likely to create many benefits in the labour market. Applying a number of alternative estimation approaches to administrative data from Austria, we estimate small to moderate effects of delaying motherhood on earnings, employment, and attachment to pre-birth firms in the medium run. However, even the largest of these effects are small relative to the average age effects, implying that delay leads to only small changes in child penalties. Much of the career return to later first birth comes from delaying the child penalty rather than changing how careers respond to children.
The share of young Australians reporting poor mental health has risen sharply over the past two decades, a pattern mirrored across many high-income countries. A central question is whether this reflects a genuine deterioration in underlying mental health or shifts in how different birth cohorts report their symptoms. Using 22 years of nationally representative longitudinal survey data from Australia (2002–2023), we construct a predicted mental health index from respondents’ socioeconomic characteristics, childhood conditions, physical health, life events, and financial circumstances, and compare it against self-reported mental health to isolate cohort-specific reporting differences. We find that the answer is both, namely, that younger cohorts apply lower thresholds when reporting distress, reflecting greater willingness to acknowledge poor mental health, and underlying mental health has genuinely deteriorated among recent cohorts, particularly females. Adjusting for cohort-specific reporting thresholds flattens the apparent rise in poor mental health, though a deterioration remains. After adjustment, the age gradient steepens, revealing that poor mental health peaks in mid-life, a life-cycle pattern that is obscured in raw self-reports. Our findings underscore the importance of accounting for reporting heterogeneity when interpreting mental health trends and planning health services.
We investigate the impact of gender composition on team performance in a real-world setting using a large-scale survey conducted within Chinese firms. We study the performance of two-person interviewer teams, with gender composition randomly assigned, tasked with complex survey data collection. Our analysis shows that two-female teams outperform both mixed-gender and two-male teams in interview completion and refusal-based questionnaire quality. Specifically, assignment to an all-female team increases the likelihood of completing an interview by 2.4
The literature on same-sex marriage has primarily focused on the effects of legal recognition, overlooking other factors that influence marriage decisions among same-sex couples. This study provides novel evidence on the role of political context by analyzing how the election of a homophobic leader affects these decisions. Using the case of Brazil, we examine the effect of revealed local support for the openly homophobic Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential elections on same-sex marriage dynamics. To estimate this effect, we apply a difference-in-differences approach with varying treatment intensity. The results show a significant increase in same-sex marriages in municipalities with higher support for Bolsonaro during the period between the election and the beginning of his presidential term. These findings suggest that perceived threats of rights restrictions can trigger immediate and significant personal decisions among minority groups, even in the absence of legal changes.
We develop a dynamic macroeconomic model with heterogeneous households, endogenous fertility, and endogenous labor market participation to study the two-way interactions between demographic change and economic growth. The model yields closed-form results in a simplified setting and is then calibrated to Japanese data from 1970 to 2019 to examine long-run trends and policy counterfactuals. We find that reducing participation costs increases employment but lowers GDP per worker and total population due to a negative spillover that increases childrearing costs; lowering the cost of raising children slows population decline but reduces GDP per capita mostly by expanding the non-working population; and faster productivity growth boosts GDP per capita and population growth, but reduces labor force participation through selection effects. Overall, fertility and labor market policies involve trade-offs—between participation and productivity or between growth and demographic stability. These trade-offs are mitigated by technological progress, which tends to enhance both economic and demographic outcomes; participation may decline via composition effects.
While international knowledge transfer drives structural transformation, the diffusion of tacit knowledge—the complex skills and procedures essential for sophisticated production—remains constrained by the need for face-to-face interaction. This paper identifies outbound business travel as a distinct channel for overcoming this friction. Exploiting a panel of 113 countries (1995–2020) and a System GMM framework to address endogeneity, I document a robust positive association between business travel and economic complexity. I show that this relationship is conditional on domestic political institutions: the returns to travel are amplified in inclusive, open political environments but vanish in highly centralized systems. Furthermore, I find evidence of diminishing marginal returns, suggesting that the benefits of travel moderate as connectivity channels saturate. I conclude that inclusive institutions function as a critical “absorptive filter” mechanism, enabling the tacit knowledge acquired abroad to translate effectively into national productive capabilities.
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between workplace co-determination in the form of works councils and income satisfaction. Controlling for a wide range of individual, job-related, and firm-level characteristics in OLS and fixed effects specifications, we observe that employees working in establishments with a works council report significantly higher income satisfaction compared to their counterparts in non-co-determined firms. Rank in the income distribution, perceived fairness of the wage, and working conditions emerge as quantitatively relevant factors in explaining the positive correlation.
This paper examines whether traditional gender norms are associated with well-being penalties for the rising share of women who are more educated than their husbands (hypogamy). Using panel data from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC) covering the period of 1993 to 2020, the results show that women in hypogamous marriages report lower life satisfaction than other married women. The negative association is less pronounced for more recent marriage cohorts, as well as for women with less traditional norms. Moreover, the association shows stronger negative well-being implications for hypogamous women whose intra-household role is not in line with norm-based expectations.
This paper examines the causal impact of cannabidiol (CBD) product availability on workplace injuries, exploiting Italy’s unintended liberalization of low-THC cannabis as a natural experiment. We use a staggered difference-in-differences approach, leveraging variation in the timing of CBD retailer entries across provinces. We find that CBD availability leads to a reduction in workplace injury rates by 2.5
We propose Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT)-type measures of population aging that incorporate a single aging-risk aversion parameter, allowing policymakers and researchers to place greater emphasis on the aging-related risks faced by the oldest individuals in society. The proposed measures satisfy key normative properties, including additive decomposition—enabling disaggregation by population subgroups—and multiplicative decomposition, which reveals three main drivers of population aging: incidence, intensity, and inequality. The proposed measures also have built-in flexibility to incorporate the old-age dependency ratio, an essential indicator in the planning and delivery of aging-related services. We discuss the implications of the irreversibility of aging for the design of the associated long-term public policy and demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed measures using data from developed and developing economies. Finally, we introduce the three i’s of population aging (TIPA) curve, a novel graphical tool for visualizing and comparing population aging across subgroups and over time. Illustrative examples for Canada, Japan, Kenya, and Nigeria show the ability of the proposed measures to accurately capture differences among countries with different demographic structures as well as the impact of demographic shocks.
Voluntary turnover imposes substantial costs on organizations, yet we know little about whether workers’ fundamental orientations toward work shape their mobility decisions. In this paper, we distinguish between job, career, and calling orientations, defined as the long-term beliefs about the role of work in one’s life. Using original survey data from the Dutch LISS panel, we show that work orientations are strong predictors of quit intentions and on-the-job search, even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics, personality traits, job characteristics, and job satisfaction. Career-oriented individuals exhibit significantly higher quit intentions and search activity, particularly when perceived promotion opportunities are limited. Calling-oriented individuals report substantially lower quit intentions and on-the-job search. By contrast, having a job orientation is not systematically associated with turnover-related outcomes. The associations between work orientations and actual job quits one and two years later are weaker, suggesting that work orientations primarily shape turnover intentions and preparatory search behavior, while actual working conditions more strongly influence mobility. Overall, our findings identify work orientations as a novel and quantitatively important determinant of turnover-related behavior and highlight the role of workers’ underlying motivations in shaping mobility beyond standard economic predictors.
This paper explores the relationship between geographic mortality differentials and human capital investment patterns in the Malthusian setup of 19th-century Armenia. We examine how variations in altitude are associated with mortality rates, human capital accumulation, and fertility decisions. Using detailed historical census and parish records, we document that higher-altitude areas tend to have lower population density, lower respiratory disease mortality, and lower overall mortality. Our empirical analysis also shows that individuals in these environments tend to display better numeracy skills and lower fertility rates. These findings align with the Ben-Porath hypothesis, suggesting that longer life horizons encourage shifting from child quantity to quality. Furthermore, these patterns are not driven by income differences or increased female autonomy arising from pastoral agriculture.
This paper examines whether adverse childhood economic shocks affect fertility in adulthood. Using Finnish administrative data and plant closures during the 1991–93 recession as exogenous parental job loss, I estimate long-run effects on children’s fertility. Paternal job loss reduces sons’ probability of parenthood by age 43 by 1.7 percentage points, while maternal job loss is positively associated with sons’ fertility and accelerates daughters’ childbearing without affecting completed fertility. Paternal displacement persistently lowers sons’ education, employment, and earnings; mediation analysis suggests that these socioeconomic scarring effects explain about half of the fertility decline. The remaining effect appears to operate through non-pecuniary mechanisms, such as family stress. Maternal job loss does not affect children’s socioeconomic outcomes, pointing to non-pecuniary channels, including changes in parent–child relationships. Overall, the findings indicate that economic shocks in adolescence have lasting intergenerational consequences for demographic behavior.
This paper examines whether interethnic marriages between immigrants and natives can reduce hiring discrimination. Drawing on social identity theory, I study whether intermarriage—signaled through a marriage to a native Finnish spouse—affects employers’ responses to job applications. I conducted a large-scale correspondence experiment in Finland, submitting approximately 1500 fictitious applications from two equally qualified female applicants, one Finnish and one Turkish. When neither applicant provided the marriage signal, the Turkish applicant faced a 26.2-percentage-point lower callback probability. The marriage signal had little effect for Finnish applicants but substantially improved outcomes for Turkish applicants, increasing their callback probability by about 25 percentage points and reducing the ethnic gap to roughly 3 percentage points. Because all applications explicitly signaled Finnish language proficiency, the presence of a native Finnish spouse can be interpreted as reflecting employers’ perceptions of social and cultural assimilation.
