We use rich administrative data from Denmark to assess medical theories that autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heritable condition transmitted through underlying parental skills. Positing that occupational choices reflect skills, we create two separate occupation-based skill measures and find that these measures are associated with ASD incidence among children, especially through the father’s side. We also assess the empirical relevance of assortative mating based on skill, concluding that intertemporal changes in assortative mating explain little of the increase in ASD diagnoses in recent decades.

Instrumental variables estimators typically must satisfy monotonicity conditions to be interpretable as capturing local average treatment effects. Building on previous research that suggests monotonicity is unlikely to hold in the context of school entrance age effects, we develop an approach for identifying the magnitude of the resulting bias. We also assess the impact on monotonicity bias of bandwidth selection in regression discontinuity (RD) designs, finding that "full sample" instrumental variables estimators may outperform RD in many cases. We argue that our approaches are applicable more broadly to numerous settings in which monotonicity is likely to fail.

As the incidence of fatal drug overdose has quadrupled in the U.S. in the past two decades, patients awaiting organ transplants may be unintended beneficiaries. We use Vital Statistics mortality data, merged with data on the universe of transplant candidates and recipients in the U.S. from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, to study the extent to which the growth in opioid-related deaths affects the supply of deceased organ donors and transplants. Using two separate identification strategies, we find that opioid-related deaths led to more than 22,000 organ transplants in the U.S. between 2008 and 2018. Although we detect little evidence of demand responses to opioid-induced organ supply shocks, we find that transplant centers are increasingly recovering organs from overdose victims for transplant, with the association between opioid-related deaths and organ donors more than doubling between 2008 and 2018. We also present evidence that transplant candidates appear to be more willing to use organs from those who died of opioid-related causes when organ shortages are relatively severe.

The uncompensated wage elasticity of labor supply is a fundamental parameter in economics. Despite its central role, very few papers have studied directly how it has changed over time. We examine the evolution of the uncompensated labor supply elasticity using cross-sectional methods over the last four decades. We find robust evidence that the elasticities weakly increased between 2000 and 2020, which represents a striking reversal from the sizeable declines for single and married women between 1979 and 2000. We additionally find that these changes arose almost entirely on the extensive margin. We then conduct a series of counterfactual simulations to identify which factors are most responsible for these trends.

Using two nationally representative datasets, we find large differences between Black and White children in teacher-reported measures of noncognitive skills. We show that teacher reports understate true Black-White skill gaps because of reference bias: teachers appear to rate children relative to others in the same school, and Black students have lower-skilled classmates on average than do White students. We pursue three approaches to addressing these reference biases. Each approach nearly doubles the estimated Black-White gaps in noncognitive skills, to roughly 0.9 standard deviations in third grade. (JEL I21, I26, J13, J15, J24)

We use linked birth and education records for all children born in Florida between 1992 and 2002 to assess the effects of neonatal health on the identification of childhood disabilities. We find that several measures of neonatal health are associated with disability incidence, although birth weight plays the most empirically relevant role. Using large samples of siblings and twins, we find that infant health influences multiple measures of disability and grade repetition in school. The association between birth weight and disability holds throughout the distribution of birth weight and across a range of socioeconomic characteristics, including maternal education and race.

Objective:There are substantial racial and regional disparities in obesity prevalence in the United States. This study partitioned the mean Body Mass Index (BMI) and obesity prevalence rate gaps between non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic whites into the portion attributable to observable obesity risk factors and the remaining portion attributable to unobservable factors at the national and the state levels in the United States (U.S.) in 2010. Design:This study used a simulated micro-population dataset combining common information from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and the U.S. Census data to obtain a reliable, large sample representing the adult populations at the national and state levels. It then applied a reweighting decomposition method to decompose the black-white mean BMI and obesity prevalence disparities at the national and state levels into the portion attributable to the differences in distribution of observable obesity risk factors and the remaining portion unexplainable with risk factors. Results:We found that the observable differences in distribution of known obesity risk factors explain 18.5% of the mean BMI difference and 20.6% of obesity prevalence disparities between non-Hispanic blacks and non-Hispanic whites. There were substantial variations in how much the differences in distribution of known obesity risk factors can explain black-white gaps in mean BMI (-67.7% to 833.6%) and obesity prevalence (-278.5% to 340.3%) at the state level. Conclusion:The results from this study demonstrate that known obesity risk factors explain a small proportion of the racial, ethnic and between-state disparities in obesity prevalence in the United States. Future etiologic studies are required to further understand the causal factors underlying obesity and racial, ethnic and geographic disparities.

We use linked birth and education records from Florida to investigate how the identification of childhood disabilities varies by race and school racial composition.Using a series of decompositions, we find that black and Hispanic students are identified with disabilities at lower rates than are observationally similar white students.Black and Hispanic students are overidentified in schools with relatively small shares of minorities and substantially under-identified in schools with large minority shares.Our results are consistent with a heightened awareness among school officials of disabilities in students who are racially and ethnically distinct from the majority race in the school.

Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of US transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region's transplant wait list, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates. (JEL D47, I11, I18)

We examine whether and to what extent parental characteristics are related to autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnoses in children. A key insight we use in this paper is that parents’ underlying traits are reflected in their choices of occupation and educational field, opening new avenues to understand intergenerational transmission of developmental disorders. To this end, we combine data from multiple administrative datasets from Danish registers and use saturated regression models that include information on parental occupations, education, family relationships and ASD diagnoses of children born between 1995 and 2010. Our project makes two substantive contributions. We add to existing evidence on the causal relationship between characteristics of parents and ASD prevalence in children, and we provide the first large-scale empirical assessment of medical theories linking assortative mating to ASD prevalence. We follow Baron Cohen et al. (1997) by characterizing educational and occupational choices as reflecting a “systemizing” trait. We show that systemizing of fathers, but not mothers, is related to ASD diagnosis rates, even conditional on parental age at birth, education level, income, geographic location, and other controls. We also find similar results when we examine the link between systemizing of paternal and maternal grandfathers and ASD diagnoses of grandchildren. Given 1 Daysal: meltem.daysal@sam.sdu.dk. Elder: telder@msu.edu. Hellerstein: Hellerst@econ.umd.edu. Imberman: imberman@msu.edu. Orsini: chrorsini@gmail.com. We greatly appreciate funding provided by the University of Maryland Population Research Center. We are also grateful for excellent research assistance provided by Martin Sædholm Nielsen and Mikkel Hasse Pedersen.

We analyze the role of formal religious education in the intergenerational transmission of religious values. We first develop a model of school choice in which the demand for religious schooling is driven partly by the desire of parents to limit their children's exposure to the influences of competing religions. The model predicts that when a religious group's share of the local population grows, the fraction of that group's members whose children attend religious schools declines. In addition, it shows that if the motivation to preserve religious identity is sufficiently strong, the fraction of all children that attend a given denomination's school is an inverse u-shaped function of the denomination's market share. Finally, the model implies that the overall demand for religious schooling is an increasing function of both the local religiosity rate and the level of religious pluralism, as measured by a Herfindahl Index. Using both U.S. county-level data and individual data from ECLS-K and NELS:88, we find evidence strongly consistent with all of the model's predictions. Our findings also illustrate that failing to control for the local religiosity rate, as is common in previous studies, may lead a researcher to erroneously conclude that religious pluralism has a negative effect on participation.

Vast organ shortages motivated recent efforts to increase the supply of transplantable organs, but we know little about the demand side of the market. We test the implications of a model of organ demand using the universe of U.S. transplant data from 1987 to 2013. Exploiting variation in supply induced by state-level motorcycle helmet laws, we demonstrate that each organ that becomes available from a deceased donor in a particular region induces five transplant candidates to join that region’s transplant waitlist, while crowding out living-donor transplants. Even with the corresponding demand increase, positive supply shocks increase post-transplant survival rates.

We assess the extent to which differences in socio-economic status are associated with racial and ethnic gaps in a fundamental measure of population health: the rate at which infants die. Using micro-level Vital Statistics data from 2000 to 2004, we examine mortality gaps of infants born to white, black, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Asian, and Native American mothers. We find that between-group mortality gaps are strongly and consistently (except for Mexican infants) associated with maternal marital status, education, and age, and that these same characteristics are powerful predictors of income and poverty for new mothers in U.S. Census data. Despite these similarities, we document a fundamental difference in the mortality gap for the three high mortality groups: whereas the black-white and Puerto Rican-white mortality gaps mainly occur at low birth weights, the Native American-white gap occurs almost exclusively at higher birth weights. We further examine the one group whose IMR is anomalous compared to the other groups: infants of Mexican mothers die at relatively low rates given their socio-economic disadvantage. We find that this anomaly is driven by lower infant mortality among foreign-born mothers, a pattern found within many racial/ethnic groups. Overall, we conclude that the infant mortality gaps for our six racial/ethnic groups exhibit many commonalities, and these commonalities suggest a prominent role for socio-economic differences.

A host of recent research has used reweighting methods to analyze the extent to which observable characteristics predict between-group differences in the distribution of an outcome. Less attention has been paid to using reweighting methods to isolate the roles of individual covariates. We analyze two approaches that have been used in previous studies, and we propose a new approach that examines the role of one covariate while holding the marginal distribution of the other covariates constant. We illustrate the differences between the methods with a numerical example and an empirical analysis of black-white wage differentials among males. Copyright (C) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We develop a model of school choice that explicitly links the literature on the relationship between religious pluralism and religious participation with a separate literature on the effects of religious market share – the proportion of people in a geographical area who belong to a given denomination – on the intensity of religious activity in that denomination. In this model, religious parents send their children to private religious schools based partly on their desire to shield their children from external influences of competing religions. Using both county-level data in the U.S. and individual data from ECLS-K and NELS:88, we find evidence in support of this theory. For example, the fraction of a denomination’s members who sends their children to religious schools declines as that denomination becomes more prevalent in the population. We further show that failing to control for the local religiosity rate, as is common in previous studies, may lead a researcher to mistakenly conclude that religious pluralism has a negative effect on religious participation.

OBJECTIVES:We examined how changes in demographic, geographic, and childbearing risk factors were related to changes in the Black-White infant mortality rate (IMR) gap over 2 decades. METHODS:Using 1983-2004 Vital Statistics, we applied inverse probability weighting methods to examine the relationship between risk factors and 3 outcomes: the overall IMR gap, its birth weight component, and its conditional (on birth weight) IMR component. RESULTS:The unexplained IMR gap (the part not related to observed risk factors) was stable, changing from 5.0 to 5.3 deaths per 1000 live births. By contrast, the explained gap declined from 4.6 to 1.9. The decline in the explained gap was driven by the changing relationship between risk factors and IMR. Further analysis revealed that most of the unexplained gap occurred among infants weighing less than 1000 grams at birth, whereas most of the explained gap occurred among infants weighing more than 1000 grams. CONCLUSIONS:The unexplained gap was stable over the last 2 decades, but the explained gap declined markedly. If the stability of the unexplained gap continues, even complete convergence of risk factors would reduce the Black-White IMR gap by only one quarter.

This paper assesses the causal effects of Catholic primary schooling on student outcomes such as test scores, grade retention, and behavior. Catholic school students have substantially better average outcomes than do public school students throughout the primary years, but we present evidence that selection bias is entirely responsible for these advantages. Estimates based on several empirical strategies, including an approach developed by Altonji et al. (2005a) to use selection on observables to assessthe bias arising from selection on unobservables, imply that Catholic schools do not appreciably boost test scores. All of the empirical strategies point to sizeable negative effects of Catholic schooling on mathematics achievement. Similarly, we find very little evidence that Catholic schooling improves behavioral and other non-cognitive outcomes once we account for selection on unobservables.

Several recent studies suggest that individual subjective survival forecasts are powerful predictors of both mortality and behavior. Using 15 years of longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, I present an alternative view. Across a wide range of ages, predictions of in-sample mortality rates based on subjective forecasts are substantially less accurate than predictions based on population life tables. Subjective forecasts also fail to capture fundamental properties of senescence, including increases in yearly mortality rates with age. To shed light on the mechanisms underlying these biases, I develop and estimate a latent-factor model of how individuals form subjective forecasts. The estimates of this model's parameters imply that these forecasts incorporate several important sources of measurement error that arguably swamp the useful information they convey.