This paper shows that an expansion of public health insurance to children from low-income families reduced the probability of those children going to prison as adults.

We show that heritable fertility, despite claims to the contrary from a recent literature inspired by mathematical biology, is not sufficient for positive long-term population growth, for empirical and theoretical reasons.

This paper lays out several key facts about the cessation of progress in adult mortality rates for successive birth cohorts in the United States. We document (i) the sharp timing of the “cohort malaise,” (ii) its uniqueness among wealthy countries, and (iii) its ubiquity within the US, which together form a distinctive “signature.”

The recent and ongoing stagnation in midlife mortality in the United States is among the country's most urgent health crises, yet its primary causes are unknown. This paper posits that the explanation could lie in another concerning trend that unfolded nearly 80 years ago.

This paper was invited to an issue of The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences edited by Anne Case, Andrew Cherlin, and Angus Deaton entitled "Moving Beyond Deaths of Despair: Rethinking Rising Morbidity and Mortality among Americans without a College Degree." Our article considers the role of labor markets.

Although the “TennCare disenrollment”—the largest disenrollment from public health insurance in US history at the time—has been studied many times, never has the exact set of disenrollees been pinpointed and traced over a long period of time, as we do in this paper by linking administrative enrollment records from CMS to large household surveys from the Census Bureau.

This paper assesses the impact of in utero and early childhood wildfire exposure on lifelong outcomes, including longevity, disability, human capital accumulation, and economic achievement in adulthood.

This paper argues that three patterns—as opposed to one, two, or many—are causing the United States to be such an outlier in terms of life expectancy among rich countries in the 21st Century. Each pattern has distinctive properties, and one—which appears to be most influential—has only recently been recognized.

Life expectancy in the United States varies widely by geography. These well documented and oft discussed disparities, however, are based on where people die. This paper provides the first county-level estimates of life expectancy based on where the deceased were born, a location with outsized impact on health that no one chooses for themselves.

This paper examines the longstanding Black-White achievement gap in new detail afforded by longitudinal, administrative data from the State of Texas. The focus is on comparing Black and White students with the same scores on the same tests in terms of their participation in gifted programs, their degree attainment, and even their subsequent earnings.