We investigate the effect of military service on labor market, health and family formation outcomes, leveraging differential changes in enlistment rates brought about by the September 11th attacks (911). Using restricted microdata, we identify hundreds of 'high service" counties in which certain birth-county cohorts exhibit large enlistment responses to 911. We find that individuals born into high service counties between 1977 and 1983 (aged 18-24 at the time of the attack), enlisted at nearly twice the rate of earlier birth cohorts (older than 24 at the time of the attack). These high service birth-county cohorts experienced a 10% increase in wages, decreased unemployment and impacts on other labor market measures as well as key household formation measures including marriage and fertility. We also find increases in the hospitalization and mortality rates. Labor market benefits outweigh mortality costs at standard discount rates.
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Did Vietnam Veterans Get Sicker in the 1990s? The Complicated Effects of Military Service on Self-Reported Health
August 2009
Working Paper Number:
CES-09-19
The veterans disability compensation (VDC) program, which provides a monthly stipend to disabled veterans, is the third largest American disability insurance program. Since the late 1990s, VDC growth has been driven primarily by an increase in claims from Vietnam veterans, raising concerns about costs as well as health. We use the draft lottery to study the long-term effects of Vietnam-era military service on health and work in the 2000 Census. These estimates show no significant overall effects on employment or work-related disability status, with a small effect on non-work-related disability for whites. On the other hand, estimates for white men with low earnings potential show a large negative impact on employment and a marked increase in non-work-related disability rates. The differential impact of Vietnam-era service on low-skill men cannot be explained by more combat or war-theatre exposure for the least educated, leaving the relative attractiveness of VDC for less skilled men and the work disincentives embedded in the VDC system as a likely explanation.
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Every Breath You Take, Every Dollar You'll Make: The Long-Term Consequences of the Clean Air Act of 1970
September 2013
Working Paper Number:
CES-13-52
This paper examines the long-term impacts of in-utero and early childhood exposure to ambient air pollution on adult labor market outcomes. We take advantage of a new administrative data set that is uniquely suited for addressing this question because it combines information on individuals' quarterly earnings together with their counties and dates of birth. We use the sharp changes in ambient air pollution concentrations driven by the implementation of the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments as a source of identifying variation, and we compare cohorts born in counties that experienced large changes in total suspended particulate (TSP) exposure to cohorts born in counties that had minimal or no changes. We nd a signi cant relationship between TSP exposure in the year of birth and adult labor market outcomes. A 10 unit decrease in TSP in the year of birth is associated with a 1 percent increase in annual earnings for workers aged 29-31. Most, but not all, of this effect is driven by an increase in labor force participation. In present value, the gains from being born into a county affected by the 1970 Clean Air Act amount to about $4,300 in lifetime income for the 1.5 million individuals born into
these counties each year.
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The Grandkids Aren't Alright: The Intergenerational Effects of Prenatal Pollution Exposure
November 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-36
Evidence shows that environmental quality shapes human capital at birth with long-run effects on health and welfare. Do these effects, in turn, affect the economic opportunities of future generations? Using newly linked survey and administrative data, providing more than 150 million parent/child links, we show that regulation-induced improvements in air quality that an individual experienced in the womb increase the likelihood that their children, the second generation, attend college 40-50 years later. Intergenerational transmission appears to arise from greater parental resources and investments, rather than heritable, biological channels. Our findings suggest that within-generation estimates of marginal damages substantially underestimate the total welfare effects of improving environmental quality and point to the empirical relevance of environmental quality as a contributor to economic opportunity in the United States.
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Long-Term Effects of Vietnam-Era Conscription: Schooling, Experience and Earnings
August 2007
Working Paper Number:
CES-07-23
Instrumental variables (IV) estimates using the draft lottery show that white Vietnam-era draftees suffered substantial post-service earnings losses in the 1970s and 1980s. Angrist (1990) explains these losses as due primarily to lost labor market experience. Non-public use data from the 2000 Census allow the first longerterm follow-up for a large sample from the draft-lottery cohorts. We use these data to estimate the effects of military service on earnings, schooling, and a number of other variables. Consistent with the loss-of -experience model, IV estimates of the effects of Vietnam-era service on earnings are close to zero in 2000, when the draft-lottery cohorts were middle-aged and experience profiles relatively flat. On the other hand, draft-lottery estimates show a marked increase in schooling for Vietnam-era veterans. A variety of evidence suggests this increase reflects the impact of the Vietnam-era GI Bill more than draft-avoidance behavior. The economic return to the increased schooling generated by Vietnam-era service, estimated in a wage equation that constrains the impact of Vietnam-era military service to run solely through the experience and schooling channels, appears to be less than the OLS return. Finally, we look at measures of disability. The IV estimates point to an increase in non-workrelated disability rates and non-SSA disability income, but the fact that there is no corresponding effect on employment, hours worked, or work-related disability rates suggests health was affected little by Vietnam-era service. Allowing for excess disability among veterans raises the estimated returns to GI-Bill schooling slightly.
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The Timing of Teenage Births: Estimating the Effect on High School Graduation and Later Life Outcomes
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-39R
We examine the long-term outcomes for a population of teenage mothers who give birth to their children around the end of their high school year. We compare the mothers whose high school education was interrupted by childbirth, because the child was born before her expected graduation date to mothers who did not experience the same disruption to their education. We find that mothers who give birth during the school year are seven percent less likely to graduate from high school, are less likely to be married, and have more children than their counterparts who gave birth just a few months later. The labor market outcomes for these two sets of teenage mothers are not statistically different, but with a lower likelihood of marriage and more children, the households of the treated mothers are more likely to fall below the poverty threshold. While differences in educational attainment have narrowed over time, the differences in labor market outcomes and family structure have remained stable.
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Head Start and Mothers' Work: Free Child Care or Something More?
March 2018
Working Paper Number:
CES-18-13
Head Start is the largest public pre-school program in the US, but it provides many additional services to families. This paper uses a discontinuity in grant writing assistance in the first year of the Head Start program to identify impacts on the work and welfare usage of mothers. Using restricted Decennial Census and administrative AFDC data I find that Head Start decreases employment rates and hours worked per week for single mothers. I also find a suggestive increase in welfare receipt for single mothers which is confirmed by an increase in the share of administrative welfare case-files that are single mother households. For all mothers combined there are no significant changes in work or welfare use. I also estimate long-run impacts, 10 years after a woman's child was eligible for Head Start. I find large and persistent declines in work for both non-white mothers and single mothers, accompanied by an increase in public assistance income and return to school. I argue that this is consistent with the 1960's era Head Start program's focus on encouraging quality parenting, parent participation and helping families access all benefits for which they were eligible.
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The Effects of Smoking in Young Adulthood on Smoking and Health Later in Life: Evidence Based on the Vietnam Era Draft Lottery
September 2008
Working Paper Number:
CES-08-35
An important, unresolved question for health policymakers and consumers is whether cigarette smoking in young adulthood has significant lasting effects into later adulthood. The Vietnam era draft lottery offers an opportunity to address this question, because it randomly assigned young men to be more likely to experience conditions favoring cigarette consumption, including highly subsidized prices. Using this natural experiment, we find that military service increased the probability of smoking by 35 percentage points as of 1978-80, when men in the relevant cohorts were aged 25-30, but later in adulthood this effect was substantially attenuated and did not lead to large negative health effects.
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Family Formation and the Great Recession
December 2020
Working Paper Number:
CES-20-42R
This paper studies how exposure to recessions as a young adult impacts long-term family formation in the context of the Great Recession. Using confidential linked survey data from U.S. Census, I document that exposure to a 1 pp larger unemployment shock in the Great Recession in one's early 20s is associated with a 0.8 pp decline in likelihood of marriage by their early 30s. These effects are not explained by substitution toward cohabitation with unmarried partners, are concentrated among whites, and are notably absent for individuals from high-income families. The estimated effects on fertility are also negative but imprecisely estimated. A back-of-the-envelope exercise suggests that these reductions in family formation may have increased the long-run impact of the Recession on consumption relative to its impact on individual earnings by a considerable extent.
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The effect of child support on selection into marriage and fertility
February 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-04
Child support policies in the United States have expanded dramatically since the mid-1970s and now cover 1 in 5 children. This paper studies the consequences of child support for marriage and fertility decisions. I first introduce a model showing that child support enforces ex ante commitment from men to provide financial support in the event of a child, which (1) increases premarital sex among couples unlikely to marry, and (2) reduces the abortion rate, by lessening the cost of raising a child as a single mom. Using variation in the timing and geography of the rollout of U.S. child support laws relative to the timing of pregnancy, from 1977 to 1992, I find that marriages following an unplanned pregnancy are less likely to occur under strengthened child support laws, accounting for about a 7-8 percentage point reduction relative to a base of 38 percent. I find that the child support rollout reduced the abortion rate by 1-2 per 1000 women aged 15-44, off a base of 28, representing about 50 percent of the total decline in the abortion rate over this period.
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Changing Opportunity: Sociological Mechanisms Underlying Growing Class Gaps and Shrinking Race Gaps in Economic Mobility
July 2024
Working Paper Number:
CES-24-38
We show that intergenerational mobility changed rapidly by race and class in recent decades and use these trends to study the causal mechanisms underlying changes in economic mobility. For white children in the U.S. born between 1978 and 1992, earnings increased for children from high-income families but decreased for children from low-income families, increasing earnings gaps by parental income ('class') by 30%. Earnings increased for Black children at all parental income levels, reducing white- Black earnings gaps for children from low-income families by 30%. Class gaps grew and race gaps shrank similarly for non-monetary outcomes such as educational attainment, standardized test scores, and mortality rates. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the divergent trends in economic mobility were caused by differential changes in childhood environments, as proxied by parental employment rates, within local communities defined by race, class, and childhood county. Outcomes improve across birth cohorts for children who grow up in communities with increasing parental employment rates, with larger effects for children who move to such communities at younger ages. Children's outcomes are most strongly related to the parental employment rates of peers they are more likely to interact with, such as those in their own birth cohort, suggesting that the relationship between children's outcomes and parental employment rates is mediated by social interaction. Our findings imply that community-level changes in one generation can propagate to the next generation and thereby generate rapid changes in economic mobility.
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