Abstract: Where children grow up shapes their economic outcomes, but identifying causal place effects is difficult because families choose where to live. To overcome this challenge, we study the Orphan Train Movement, a large-scale child welfare program from 1853-1929 that relocated orphaned children from northeastern cities to families across the United States. Institutional procedures resulted in quasi-random variation in placement locations based on arrival timing to an orphanage. We digitize archival records and link riders to Census data to measure long-run outcomes. We define place opportunity using county-level characteristics capturing education, urbanization, wealth, and labor market size. Riders placed in high-opportunity counties earn more lifetime income, have fewer children, and are less likely to work in agriculture. These effects persist into the second generation. Examining dimensions separately reveals that urbanization, wealth, and labor market size drive effects. We find important age heterogeneity, where older children show larger marginal gains from high-opportunity places despite younger children having higher adult baseline earnings. Decomposing place effects by geographic scale shows household factors are approximately five times larger than county-level measures, though both are independently significant. Intergenerational transmission operates through a persistent change to individuals rather than geographic persistence, as effects continue despite high migration from riders' original placement counties. Our findings provide the first causal evidence that place effects transmit across generations.
Abstract: Mothers considering placing a child for adoption face information and time constraints. We use a unique dataset from one of the largest private adoption agencies in the U.S. that records mothers' search and adoption decisions to characterize their decision-making. We establish several stylized patterns of mothers' behavior and show that these patterns conform to a model of search with deadlines. Evidence of decision inattention in the choice of adoptive families is present, implying the design of search platforms may be consequential for the welfare of the child. Building on the evidence of search behavior in the data, we use time remaining in pregnancy at the start of the search to measure search intensity. We estimate the welfare effect of the U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs decision to repeal national access to abortion using a sufficient statistics approach. Our preferred interpretation shows that the policy decreased the welfare of mothers considering adoption by at least nine percentage points. The deleterious effects of the Dobbs decision concentrate on minority mothers.
“The Efficacy of Advocacy in Foster Care"
I examine the effects of Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) volunteers on foster children's permanency and future welfare outcomes.
“Measuring the Impact of Male Unemployment on Intrafamily Outcomes” with Matthew Eaton and Miranda I. Lambert
We study the impact of male job loss on health and education for individuals in the household.
“Southern Lynchings and Children's Educational Attainment” with Mary Kate Batistich, Kalena E. Cortes, and Kendall J. Kennedy
We measure how exposure to racially motivated violence during childhood impacts school attainment through digitizing historical records.
We examine prospective adoptive families' preferences regarding children and test how information affects the formation of those preferences.
Abstract: This paper explores the implementation of a price-level targeting regime compared to an inflation targeting regime in the basic New Keynesian framework. Additionally, expectations are defined under a baseline method and an alternative method. Both monetary policy regimes implement Survey of Professional Forecasters' data as survey expectations for the baseline method and conversely use adaptive expectations as the alternative method of defining expectations. The results of the simulation show price-level targeting is preferred to inflation targeting under a favorable inflation shock if expectations are defined by the baseline method. However, inflation targeting provides a better result than price-level targeting if expectations are defined under the alternative method. This result raises important questions in defining expectations but does not dismiss an adoption of price-level targeting as a potentially superior rule in a monetary policy regime.