Research

This paper studies whether a major environmental shock alters economic mobility and individuals’ positions in the economic distribution. I examine the 1937 Ohio River Flood by linking a newly constructed enumeration-district-level measure of flood damage to Census records from 1920, 1930, and 1940. The empirical design compares individuals living in damaged enumeration districts before the flood with individuals in undamaged comparison areas, conditional on pre-flood characteristics. Flood exposure shifts the father-son occupational-rank gap downward by 1.6 rank points; relative to their respective control means, upward mobility falls by 6 percent and large downward mobility rises by 7 percent. In the broader linked sample, exposure lowers post-flood occupational rank conditional on pre-flood rank and raises the probability of ending in the bottom occupational-rank quartile. Relative to their respective control means, wage income among earners falls by 6 percent, years of schooling by 7 percent, and pure unemployment rises by 17 percent. Mechanism evidence is consistent with occupational displacement: declines in self-employment and occupational status are substantially larger among individuals self-employed before the flood, while public emergency work is more prevalent in cities with greater flood severity.

We develop a framework for detecting intergenerational complementarity in a mature public program and apply it to Head Start. We distinguish two objects: an intergenerational effect, whether a parent's exposure improves child outcomes, and an intergenerational complementarity, whether a parent's exposure changes the return to the child's own exposure. A model of skill formation across two generations shows that the complementarity nets a positive complementarity channel, working through the child's initial skills, against a negative substitution channel, working through maternal time, so its sign is an empirical question. We show that the long operating history of Head Start makes the complementarity recoverable outside an experiment. Combining the NLSY79 and its child sample with two policy episodes, the 1960s program rollout and the 1990s funding expansions, we measure policy-induced exposure separately in the mother and child generations and form the four exposure sequences of a multigenerational experiment. We find a positive and significant complementarity in early mathematics, and none in reading. As early childhood programs come to reach more than one generation of the same family, single-generation evaluations cannot recover how a family's prior exposure shapes the returns to later investment.

This paper examines the effects of a large-scale early childhood development program in Chile on children, caregivers, and family wellbeing. Using eligibility thresholds for targeted benefits and a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that program participation reduces children's behavioral problems and improves caregivers' cognitive outcomes and parent-child interactions. The results highlight the broader family impacts of early childhood interventions and contribute to the literature on child development, family investments, and social policy.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s caused widespread environmental devastation, leading to drought, dust storms, and economic hardship for millions of families in the United States. Leveraging geographic and intensity variation, this project analyzes both the direct and indirect effects of families' migration choices on children's outcomes across five states. Direct effects are defined as those experienced by families remaining in the Dust Bowl area throughout the disaster, while indirect effects arise when families migrate as a mitigation response. Using linked U.S. Census records from 1920 to 1940, the study focuses on families from the five most affected states and estimates the long-run effects of Dust Bowl migration on children's educational and labor-market outcomes. The project highlights the importance of considering intergenerational effects when evaluating climate-adaptation decisions.