BPC has developed a transformational research focus on family policy, particularly those policies directly related to child health and well-being. This includes family policy addressing child health in the U.S., the child and later life health benefits of early life investments such as higher quality schooling, and government policies related to family-friendly workplaces.
Intergenerational Impacts of Health Investments (PI: Edward Miguel; Economics). This project estimates the causal impact of health, skills, and financial investments made during childhood and adolescence on recipients’ long-run life outcomes, as well as on the health and cognitive development of recipients’ children, exploiting experimental variation to overcome the key methodological challenge of confounding. The research builds on the existing Kenya Life Panel Survey longitudinal dataset, which contains detailed information on individual health, education, social, and labor market outcomes over an exceptionally long timeframe (1998-2016). The project will extend this unusual panel dataset through 2020 for 6,500 adults and 7,200 of their children, and estimate the extent to which the youth human capital and financial interventions can improve long-run living standards, and help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
R01HD090118.
Educational Trajectories & Health: When People Finish School and How It Matters (PI: Mujahid Mahasin, Public Health. Irene Yeh, UC Merced). We implement a mixed methods approach to address our overall aim – to investigate if and how different education trajectories affect health and how this association may differ by sex, race/ethnicity, and family and school circumstances. Educational trajectories refer to how people attain their education status, such as high school or college graduate, over time. We will first analyze the 1979 and 1997 waves of data of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY). Then, based upon these findings, we conduct semi-structured interviews in three diverse populations across the US to explore possible mechanisms for the associations observed quantitatively. Finally, we utilize an additional secondary dataset, Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) that will allow us to explore the possible roles of some of the mechanisms identified qualitatively.
R01AG056360.
Agricultural Mechanization and Mass Incarceration (PI: Chris Muller
, Sociology).
Many scholars endorse the view that increasing joblessness contributed mass incarceration, but there is surprisingly little causal evidence for this claim. Moreover, previous work on joblessness and incarceration has focused almost exclusively on the decline in manufacturing jobs, but the loss of agricultural work – particularly among black men – was likely more consequential. This project uses archival data on incarceration from the state of Georgia to study the effect of joblessness due to agricultural mechanization on the rise of incarceration in the U.S.