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While several types of mental illness, including substance abuse disorders, have been linked with poor labor market outcomes, no current research has been able to examine the effects of childhood ADHD. As ADHD has become one of the most prevalent childhood mental conditions, it is useful to understand the full set of consequences of the illness. This paper uses a longitudinal national sample, including sibling pairs, to show important labor market outcome consequences of ADHD. The employment reduction is between 10-14 percentage points, the earnings reduction is approximately 33%, and the increase in social assistance is 15 points, which are larger than many estimates of the black-white earnings gap and the gender earnings gap. A small share of the link is explained by education attainments and co-morbid health conditions and behaviors. The results also show important differences in labor market consequences by family background and age of onset. These findings, along with similar research showing that ADHD is linked with poor education outcomes and adult crime, suggest that treating childhood ADHD can substantially increase the acquisition of human capital.

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Recent studies analyzing the effects of religion on various economic, social, health and political outcomes have been largely associational. Although some attempts have been made to establish causation using instrument variable (IV) or difference-in-difference (DID) methods, the instruments and the spatial and temporal variations used in these studies suffer from the usual issues that threaten the use of these identification techniques--validity of exclusion restrictions, quality of counterfactuals in the presence of spatial assortative sorting of people, and concern about omitted variable bias in the absence of information on family level unobservables and child-specific investment by families. During the adolescent years, religious participation might be a matter of limited choice for many individuals, as it is often heavily reliant on parents and family background more generally. Moreover, the focus of most of the studies has been on religious rites and rituals i.e., religious participation or on the intensity of participation. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this paper analyzes the effects of a broad set of measures of religiosity on substance use at different stages of the life course. In contrast to previous studies, we find positive effects of religion on reducing all addictive substance use during adolescence, but not in a consistent fashion during the later years for any other illicit drugs except for crystal meth and marijuana.

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Intensive agriculture and deep plowing resulted in top-soil erosion and dust storms during the 1930s. These effects have been shown to affect agricultural income and land values that persisted for years. Given the growing literature on the relevance of in-utero and early-life exposures, it is surprising that studies focusing on links between the Dust Bowl and later-life health find inconclusive and mixed results. This paper re-evaluates this literature and studies the long-term effects of in-utero and early-life exposure to top-soil erosion caused by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s on old-age longevity. Specifically, we employ Social Security Administration death records linked with the full-count 1940 census and implement event studies and difference-in-difference designs to compare the longevity of individuals in high/medium versus low top-soil erosion counties post-1930 versus pre-1930. We find intent-to-treat reductions in longevity of about 0.9 months for those born in high erosion counties post-1930. We show that these effects are not an artifact of preexisting trends in longevity. Additional analyses suggest the effects are more pronounced among children raised in farm households, females, and those with lower maternal education. We also provide suggestive evidence that reductions in adulthood income are a likely mechanism channel.

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This paper uses recently released data from a national longitudinal sample to present new evidence of the longer term effects of adolescent depression on labor market outcomes. Results suggest reductions in labor force attachment of approximately 5 percentage points and earnings reductions of approximately 20% for individuals with depressive symptoms as an adolescent. These effects are only partially reduced when controlling for channels operating through educational attainment, adult depressive symptoms, or co-occurring illnesses. Further, the unique structure of the data allows for high-school fixed effects as well as suggestive evidence using sibling comparisons, which allows controls for potentially important unobserved heterogeneity. Overall, the results suggest that the links between adolescent depression and labor market outcomes are quite robust and important in magnitude, suggesting that there may be substantial labor market returns to further investments in treatment opportunities during adolescence.

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There have been numerous attempts to both document the income-health gradient in children and to understand the nature of the tie. In this paper we review and summarize existing studies and then use a unique school based panel data set from the US to attempt to further our understanding of the relationship. The long duration (5 observations, 9 years) allows us to add to the understanding of the pattern of the tie, through our ability to test for changes in health status and multiple measures of income, and the school-based nature of the data allow us to add community SES to the model. Increasing understanding of the income-health gradient may allow more effective targeting of interventions to decrease the gradient and hence decrease health disparities among children.