Codirectors
Janet Currie is the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at the Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, and Co-Director of the Princeton Center for Health and Wellbeing. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of child development, particularly socioeconomic differences in health and access to health care. She has been an NBER affiliate since 1991.
Anna Aizer is a professor of economics at Brown University. She is a health and labor economist with primary interests in children’s health and well-being, and especially the impact of public programs such as cash transfers on children. She has been an NBER affiliate since 2004.
Featured Program Content
The US Surgeon General has called the child mental health crisis “the defining public health crisis of our time.” In 2020, 13 percent of US children aged...
Concern about children’s welfare is often cited as a reason for strong tenant protection laws. In The Effects of Eviction on Children (NBER Working Paper...
Growing up in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods can have long-lasting effects. In 1966, Black families in Chicago sued the public housing...
Loding Complete
Explore Program Content
April 30 to May 1, 2026 - Conference
July 24-25, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
The development of English-language skills, a near necessity in todays global economy, is heavily influenced by historical national decisions about whether to subtitle or dub TV content. While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of...
This paper considers why fertility has fallen to historically low levels in virtually all high-income countries. Using cohort data, we document rising childlessness at all observed ages and falling completed fertility. This cohort perspective underscores the need to explain long-run shifts in...
July 3, 2025 - Article
Author(s) - Janet Currie
The US Surgeon General has called the child mental health crisis the defining public health crisis of our time. In 2020, 13 percent of US children aged 3 to 17 had a diagnosed mental or behavioral condition. In 2021, mental health services for children cost $31 billion47 percent of pediatric medical...
July 1, 2025 - Article
Author(s) - Robert Collinson, Deniz Dutz, John E. Humphries, Nicholas S. Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum & Winnie van Dijk
Concern about childrens welfare is often cited as a reason for strong tenant protection laws. In The Effects of Eviction on Children (NBER Working Paper 33659), Robert Collinson, Deniz Dutz, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas S. Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum, and Winnie van Dijk provide new evidence on the...
Very low household wealth, or net worth poverty (NWP), is the modal form of poverty for American children, yet little is understood about how it is experienced across childhood or its associations with childrens human capital accumulation. Using data from the 1999-2021 waves of the Panel Study of...
Author(s) - Martha J. Bailey
The neoclassical economics of childbearing turns 65 this year, marking the anniversary of Gary Beckers foundational article on the subject in 1960. This review article begins with a study of how childbearing has evolved in the United States over the last century, identifying distinctive features of...
We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young childrenthrough duration expansions to the kindergarten dayto better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time from 1992...
Using Eurobarometer data for 21 Western European countries since 1973 we show the U-shape in life satisfaction by age, present for so long, has now vanished. In 13 northern European countries - Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden,...
With the goal of lowering incentives for alcohol and substance abuse, U.S. states have historically permitted private health insurers to deny reimbursement of medical claims stemming from alcohol or opioid impairment. However, a potential unintended consequence of such exclusion provisions is that...
Early twentieth century efforts to overhaul the quality of medical education in the United States (principally between 1905 and 1915 the Flexner Report Era) led to a steep decline in the number of medical schools and medical school graduates. In this paper, we examine the consequences of these...
In this chapter we survey recent advances in modeling cultural transmission in the economics literature. We first present the basic canonical model of the evolution of cultural traits in the social sciences. Both Economics and Evolutionary anthropology build on this canonical model but their...
A smaller human population would emit less carbon, other things equal, but how large is the effect? Here we test the widely-shared view that an important benefit of the ongoing, global decline in fertility will be reductions in long-run temperatures. We contrast a baseline of global depopulation...
In overturning Roe v. Wade and triggering laws in many states that ban or severely restrict abortions, the Supreme Courts landmark 2022 Dobbs decision dramatically altered the landscape for reproductive health in the U.S. Prior research has highlighted the far-reaching impact of abortion...
Birth rates are falling worldwide, in every region. Falling birth rates can be decomposed into two components: (1) an increase in childlessness (i.e., lifetime nulliparity), and (2) fewer children ever born to women who have at least one child (completed cohort fertility among the parous). This...
Author(s) - Chad D. Cotti, Tessie Krishna, Johanna Catherine Maclean, Erik T. Nesson & Joseph J. Sabia
The confluence of a youth mental health crisis and high rates of teenage nicotine vaping has led some U.S. tobacco control advocates to argue that reducing access to electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) through policies such as ENDS taxation may improve youth and young adult mental health....
Author(s) - Charles Yuji Horioka
In this paper, we discuss bequests and other intergenerational transfers and what impact they have on the consumption, saving, and labor supply behavior of households. We show that bequests and other intergenerational transfers are prevalent in most countries, that they are sometimes motivated by...
A college degree offers a pathway to economic mobility for low-income students. Using a multi-site randomized controlled trial combined with administrative and survey data, we demonstrate that intensive advising during high school and college significantly increases bachelors degree attainment among...
Using data on 2.5 million great-grandchildren linked to their great-grandfathers in the US (18501940), we show that economic gaps persisted strongly across four generations despite major structural change. We find that one-third of the initial differences in economic status across white great...
Why and when could basic income inhibit employment? We randomize 200 dollars of basic income per month for two years within a non-urban disadvantaged sample tracked using high-frequency administrative data. The amount provided is 21% of average all-source income. In the short term (0.5 years after...
Salary negotiations are a widespread phenomenon that can shape key labor market outcomes, including welfare and inequality. We provide novel empirical and theoretical insights into the causes and consequences of salary negotiations. We conducted two field experiments involving over 3,100 job seekers...
Author(s) - Kabir Dasgupta, Andrew C. Johnston, Linda Kirkpatrick, Maxim N. Massenkoff & Alexander Plum
How does family breakdown and divorce affect spouses and their children? We provide new evidence using a matched difference-in-differences design in rich administrative data from New Zealand. While most outcomes remain stable prior to separation, parents' mental health deteriorates in the lead-up....
June 1, 2025 - Article
Over 6 million children in the United States attend public schools located within 250 meters of a major roadway. In The Effects of Daily Air Pollution on Students and Teachers (NBER Working Paper 33549), Sarah Chung, Claudia Persico, and Jing Liu examine how daily variation in ambient air pollution...
Author(s) - Katherine Michelmore
Over the last several decades, there have been historic shifts in the structure of cash transfer programs in Western, developed countries, including the U.S., Canada, and U.K. For all three of these countries, the turn of the 21st century marked a shift away from unconditional cash transfer programs...
We elicited over a million stated preference choices over 126 dimensions or aspects of well-being from a sample of 3,358 respondents on Amazons Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Our surveys also collected self-reported well-being (SWB) questions about respondents current levels of the aspects of well-being....
We study the shift to fully remote work at a large call center in Turkey, highlighting three findings. First, fully remote work increased the share of women, including married women, rural and smaller-town residents. By accessing groups with traditionally lower labor-force participation the firm was...
Schools have long played a frontline role in efforts to contain infectious diseases and prevent spread to the wider community. These include vaccination requirements, school closures during periods of high illness, and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) during outbreaks. In...
We study the effects of government-subsidized childcare on women's careers and firm outcomes using linked tax filing data. Exploiting cohort-level variation in childcare access based on a Quebec universal childcare reform, we show that earlier access to childcare not only increases new mothers'...
Conditionality can prevent poor households from receiving cash transfers. Re-analyzing five randomized evaluations of conditional cash transfers, we find: (1) non-compliers households that do not meet education conditions are common, representing 4.6% to 37% of eligible households; (2) non...
Author(s) - Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan, Lisa A. Gennetian, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Nathan A. Fox, Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Sonya Troller-Renfree, Sangdo Han, Shannon Egan-Dailey, Timothy D. Nelson, Jennifer Mize Nelson, Sarah Black, Michael Georgieff & Debra Karhson
Developmental differences between children growing up in poverty and their higher-income peers are frequently reported. However, the extent to which such differences are caused by differences in family income is unclear. To study the causal role of income on childrens development, the Babys First...
Influenza causes substantial illness and healthcare utilization among children. Randomized clinical trials (RCTs) demonstrate that the influenza vaccine reduces influenza illness detectable via active surveillance, but RCTs typically have insufficient samples to examine economically meaningful...
May 22-23, 2025 - ConferenceProgram
Researchers increasingly have access to two types of data: (i) large observational datasets where treatment (e.g., class size) is not randomized but several primary outcomes (e.g., graduation rates) and secondary outcomes (e.g., test scores) are observed and (ii) experimental data in which treatment...
Since 1991, Chile has provided large, renewable cash grants to indigenous children in lower-income households, conditional on school enrollment. We estimate intent-to-treat effects of grant exposure on indigenous adults and their children, leveraging variation in expected grant exposure across birth...
Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools, applying...
State laws that mandate in-grade retention for struggling readers are widespread in the U.S., covering 34% of public-school third graders in 2023-24. This study investigates the impacts of Michigans third-grade reading law on subsequent test scores and school progress outcomes for the 2020-21 and...
Gender imbalance in time spent on child rearing causes gender inequalities in labor market outcomes, human capital accumulation, and economic mobility. We conduct a large-scale field experiment with a near-universe of US schools to investigate a potential source of inequality: external demands for...
Nearly a third of American children experience parental divorce before adulthood. To understand its consequences, we use linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes. Following divorce, parents move...
We evaluate impacts heterogeneity of an Early Childhood Intervention, with respect to the Educational Attainment Polygenic Score (EA4 PGS) constructed from DNA data based on GWAS weights from a European population. We find that the EA4 PGS is predictive of several measures of child development,...
Child maltreatment is a major public health concern in the United States. Maltreatment is associated with a range of poor health, developmental, and economic outcomes for child victims. In this study, we examine the impact of recent state paid sick leave mandates on child maltreatment reports over...
Author(s) - Hema Shah, Lisa A. Gennetian, Katherine Magnuson, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Laura R. Stilwell, Kimberly Noble & Greg Duncan
Household time and money allocations in response to income support programs vary across diverse family circumstances and preferences, yet such heterogeneous responses are not well understood. Using data from a large-scale, multisite, U.S.-based randomized controlled study, we examine heterogeneity...
Chinas total fertility rate declined very little following implementation of the One Child Policy (OCP) in 1979/1980, but then fell sharply, by more than one-third, during the early 1990s. In this paper, we propose that strengthening bureaucratic incentives under the One Vote Veto (OVV) policy,...
May 1, 2025 - Article
Growing up in racially and economically segregated neighborhoods can have long-lasting effects. In 1966, Black families in Chicago sued the public housing authority over housing policies that segregated Black families. In response, the Chicago Housing Authority created a voucher program that would...
Empirical research in economics often examines the behavior of agents located in a geographic space. In such cases, statistical inference is complicated by the interdependence of economic outcomes across locations. A common approach to account for this dependence is to cluster standard errors based...
Author(s) - Robert Collinson, Deniz Dutz, John Eric Humphries, Nicholas S. Mader, Daniel Tannenbaum & Winnie van Dijk
Eviction may be an important channel for the intergenerational transmission of poverty, and concerns about its effects on children are often raised as a rationale for tenant protection policies. We study how eviction impacts children's home environment, school engagement, educational achievement,...
We examine the effect of a representative pension reform on the retention and productivity of workers. The reform cut pension annuities and early retirement benefits for public school teachers, projected to save eight percent of pension revenues. We leverage administrative records and a...
Mangroves provide vital ecosystem services like storm surge protection and carbon sequestration, but their coverage is rapidly declining. This study evaluates an environmental education program in the Dominican Republic, targeting childrens attitudes, knowledge, behaviors, and willingness to pay for...
Author(s) - Eric V. Edmonds, Priya Mukherjee, Nikhilesh Prakash, Nishith Prakash & Shwetlena Sabarwal
We examine the impact of a randomized therapy intervention on Nepali adolescents at risk of school dropout. Our study is the largest of its kind (N = 1,707) and is novel in that participation does not require a preexisting diagnosis. Ninety percent of those offered therapy participated, with younger...
This paper revisits the link between education-based marriage market sorting and income inequality. Leveraging Danish administrative data, we develop a novel categorization of ambition types that is based on starting wages and wage growth trajectories associated with detailed educational programs....
- ...
Show: results