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Principal Investigators: Kenneth Chay and Douglas Almond

Chay and Almond are using the U.S. Vital Statistics Microdata (currently being compiled at Berkeley) to credibly estimate the nature and importance of long-run linkages between the environmental conditions of early life, and subsequent health later in life. They find that black women born in 1967-1969 have substantially lower risk factor rates as adults and are much less likely to give birth to an infant with low birth weight and APGAR scores than black women born in 1961-1963. The between-cohort gains for white women are small to non-existent, consistent with the smaller health improvements for white infants born during the 1960s. The timing of the black-white relative birth cohort improvements corresponds with the timing of the 1960s infant health gains and is robust to several tests of internal validity.