HCEO

HCEO members Pietro Biroli, Kevin Thom, Titus Galama and coauthors find strong relationships between polygenic scores and later-life socioeconomic, anthropometric, health and behavioral outcomes. They find the same for SES status, but find no evidence of sizable gene-environment interactions.

Sources of Inequality at Birth: The Interplay Between Genes and Parental Socioeconomic Status | HCEO Author(s) Pietro Biroli Nicolau Martin-Bassols Andries Marees Hans van Kippersluis Cornelius Rietveld Pia Arce Kevin Thom Stephanie von Hinke Jeremy Vollen Titus Galama The start of a human’s life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into ...

HCEO members .bsky.social, .bsky.social, Titus Galama and coauthors find that both genes (measured via polygenic scores) and SES status are both strongly associated with later-life outcomes-- but they find no evidence of sizable gene-environment interactions.

Sources of Inequality at Birth: The Interplay Between Genes and Parental Socioeconomic Status | HCEO Author(s) Pietro Biroli Nicolau Martin-Bassols Andries Marees Hans van Kippersluis Cornelius Rietveld Pia Arce Kevin Thom Stephanie von Hinke Jeremy Vollen Titus Galama The start of a human’s life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into ...

An intervention targeting mothers who curtailed their employment due to childcare responsibilities found that improving work–family reconciliation can support mothers’ return to the workforce, promote investments in existing children, and, under some conditions, strengthen interest in having more children. Findings are detailed in a new working paper from HCEO member Daniela Del Boca and coauthors.

Supporting Mothers Back to Work: Experimental Evidence on Employment, Fertility, and Child Outcomes | HCEO Author(s) Daniela Del Boca Luca Favero Chiara Pronzato Many advanced economies face persistently low fertility alongside rapid population ageing, raising concerns about economic sustainability and demographic balance. Addressing these challenges requires both sustained labor market participation amo...

Is access to political power truly open and equal in the US? HCEO member Eric Chyn and colleagues find evidence over two centuries shows that "children from wealthy and privileged households have been substantially overrepresented in elected office."

That shapes policy, they find. "Districts represented by higher status candidates are less likely to support pro-tax positions in roll-call voting," the authors write in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.

The Persistence of Power: How Family Origins Shape Political Representation and Policy Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Why do schools differ in a system with tuition-free education, equalized school spending and a standardized curriculum? Because parents sort themselves into neighborhoods with better peer, teacher, and school value-added characteristics, new research from Sadegh Eshaghnia, James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation), and Goya Razavi shows.

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New work from James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation) and Jin Zhou explores the microdynamics of early childhood learning, with important new insights on how skills develop. Skills are produced by skill- and life cycle–stage-specific learning processes and do not appear to share a common unit scale across levels, so they must be measured and assessed carefully, the authors find.

A Study of the Microdynamics of Early-Childhood Learning | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 134, No 1 This paper investigates the weekly evolution of skills as measured by unique data from a widely emulated early-childhood home-visiting program in rural China. The design of the study avoids input endogeneity issues and lack of comparable measures of skills that plague previous studies. Skills, nomin...

Australia's social media ban for those under age 16 has been ineffective, and the reasons are social. Only a quarter of 14- and 15-year olds surveyed are complying with the law, because they believe their peers are still active on banned platforms. "Sustaining high compliance requires two ingredients: the share of compliers must be high enough and those who comply must find it preferable to continue complying. The current ban achieves neither," HCEO members Leonardo Bursztyn, Angela Duckworth and colleagues write in a new NBER paper detailing their findings.

Why Bans Fail: Tipping Points and Australia's Social Media Ban Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Does addiction to ci******es reduce educational attainment? Does education impact cigarette addiction? Our director, James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation), and Rong Hai show that education causally reduces smoking — and if we could eliminate smoking as a choice, college attendance rates would rise by 2 percentage points.

The Causal Effects of Youth Cigarette Addiction and Education | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 134, No 5 We develop and estimate a life-cycle model of addiction in which forward-looking youth choose to smoke, attend school, work part-time, and consume while facing borrowing constraints. The model features multiple channels for studying the reciprocal causal effects of addiction and education. Variation...

Participating in high school sports is strongly associated with a higher probability of graduating and attending college. Intercollegiate varsity and intramural athletes are more likely to earn a degree than non-athletes and go on to earn higher wages after college. Benefits are especially strong for female athletes, research from our director, James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation), Colleen Loughlin, and Haihan Tian shows.

The Benefits of Scholastic Athletics Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.

Early childcare attendance boosts academic performance later in grades 5 and 9, a new working paper from HCEO member Costas Meghir shows. Starting childcare one year earlier increases math scores by 9.7% of a standard deviation in grade 9. It also improves math outcomes for children of mothers who did not complete high school and benefits the children of immigrants.

Early Childcare Attendance and Cognitive skills in Adolescence Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.