Full Citation
Title: A Decline in the Health and Human Capital of Americans Born After 1947
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2019
ISBN:
ISSN:
DOI:
NSFID:
PMCID:
PMID:
Abstract: Declines in American educational attainment and test scores in the 1970s, stagnating wages since that period, and recent increases in the mortality of white Americans have each sparked large literatures and public outcry. I propose a link between these notable episodes of decline and a few declines that had previously gone unnoticed. I present evidence of a precisely timed decline in the health and human capital of cohorts of Americans born after World War II, which predated labor market entry and played an important role in the above declines. There are discontinuous changes in the slope of “cohort effects” such that those born after 1947 or 1948 were less likely to work in white-collar occupations, earned less, gave birth to less healthy infants, and had a greater likelihood of dying prematurely, than they would have had the trend for earlier born cohorts continued. These declines are remarkably widespread among individuals born in the United States. The timing of the declines by cohort correspond closely to the schooling and test score declines but do not appear to be explained fully by them. I present tentative evidence that the root cause may have been a worsening of the respiratory health environment when these cohorts were infants.
Url: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/01f8/e33762e42263836c624b7b34e86ab8e3be95.pdf
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Reynolds, Nicholas
Publisher: Brown University
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other
Countries: