NBER Publications by Resul Cesur

While descriptive evidence suggests that deployment in the Global War on Terrorism is associated with adverse mental health, the causal effect of combat is not well established. Using data drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we exploit exogenous variation in deployment assignment and find that soldiers deployed to combat zones where they engage in frequent enemy firefight or witness allied or civilian deaths are at substantially increased risk for suicidal ideation, psychological counseling, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Our estimates imply lower-bound health care costs of $1.5 to $2.7 billion for combat-induced PTSD.

While the effects of low birth weight have long been explored, those of high birth weight have been essentially ignored. Economists have analyzed the negative effects that low birth weight might have on subsequent school outcomes, while taking into account unobserved characteristics that may be common to families with low birth weight babies and negative outcomes in terms of school test scores when children, in addition to labor market income when adults. Today, however, with increasing obesity rates in the United States, high birth weight has become a potential concern, and has been associated in the medical literature with an increased likelihood of becoming an overweight child, adolescent, and subsequently an obese adult. Overweight and obesity, in turn, are associated with a host of...