Health at birth is an important predictor of long-term outcomes, including education, income,
and disability. Recent evidence suggests that maternal disadvantage leads to worse health …

Take-up of a social benefit is usually defined as receiving a benefit for which an individual or
household is eligible. The take-up rate is the fraction of those eligible for a program who …

That prenatal events can have life-long consequences is now well established.
Nevertheless, research on the fetal origins hypothesis is flourishing and has expanded to …

We study the effect of application costs on the targeting of disability programs. We identify
these effects using the closings of Social Security Administration field offices, which provide …

We develop a framework for welfare analysis of interventions designed to increase take-up
of social safety net programs in the presence of potential behavioral biases. We calibrate the …

This paper studies whether distance shapes credit allocation by estimating the impact of
bank branch closings during the 2000s on local access to credit. To generate plausibly …

We use novel, large-scale data on 17.5 million Americans to study how a policy-driven
increase in economic resources affects children's long-term outcomes. Using the 2000 …

This paper studies how in utero exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures affects later
mental health. We find that prenatal exposure to the death of a maternal relative increases …

A growing literature suggests that stressful events in pregnancy can have negative effects on
birth outcomes. Some of the estimates in this literature may be affected by small samples …

Background Previous studies have reported a high prevalence of excessive gestational
weight gain (GWG) in women with prepregnancy BMI classified as overweight and obese …