Lyman Expand the House Stone, AKA 石來民

One of their most compelling findings showing that parents matter is from a robustness test: they show that maternal death matters MORE than paternal death for child outcomes, consistent with the idea that it's parent investment, not income earning, that matters here. #NBERday

The sample here is the full census of all Israeli children who attended secular schools over a nearly 20-year period. They've got tens of thousands of death/divorce events included, so a pretty solid sample to work with. #NBERday

Now, two caveats that sprang to mind quickly while reading. 1. Israel may not be the US. 2. They assume a parent's death post-matriculation-exam could not have causally altered pre-exam interactions. But chronic diseases absolutely could matter! #NBERday

A parent suffering from end-stage cancer for the year before the exam and dying after the exam should NOT cause any effect on exam performance in their model. In reality, it would. #NBERday

However, if anything, this should strengthen their result: some of the "treated" group are accidentally included in the "untreated" comparison, reducing estimated effect size. #NBERday

Their effects are robust to family size as well, and to within-household specialization. Whoever spends the most time with kids, their traits, so to speak, are most replicated in the kids. #NBERday

There aren't any pretty charts for this one. But the point is, having an educated parent spend a lot of time with a kid causally improves that kid's chance at passing a high-stakes exam. In Israel. #NBERday

This is one of the better demonstrations of parental time investment as a causal agent in child outcomes that I've seen. #NBERday

Also, a note, this is a neat article to give a peripheral cite to if you want to talk about whether having parents spend time at home with their kids is a worthwhile objective of social policy. #NBERday

Next paper I will briefly mention: it's a description of survey data on what kinds of investments in education parents *think* are valuable. They seem to think $45 in weekly tutoring is worth as much as 3 hours of parent time, either is worth more than school switching. #NBERday

Oh, didn't link. HEre's link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25513  #NBERday

I might buy that 3 hours of parent attention might matter as much as a school switch but not that $45 in tutoring is worth as much. #NBERday

British parents really don't care much about school quality. Weird. #NBERday

Speaking of school quality! Q: Does locating a school downwing of a polluter reduce student outcomes? A: Yep. #NBERday https://www.nber.org/papers/w25489 

The polluter here, btw, is just a major highway. So we're not talking about billowing smokestacks; just cars. And being downwind does indeed lower student performance. #NBERday

They test this within-student transfers between middle/high school where the feeders aren't 1-to-1, so you get some variation. #NBERday

Oh, crap, folks, I misordered a paper! I meant to do this one back with the parenting bit! Q: Does daddy getting shot by the Confederates impact a kid's later-in-life outcomes? A: For girls, yes. It made them poorer and more likely to die. #NBERday https://www.nber.org/papers/w25480 

Practically speaking, this is *actually* a measure of whether a father being hit with a physical disability in a manual labor economy impacts childrens' outcomes. Put another way: do negative income shocks matter. Yeah, they do. #NBERday

And who do negative income shocks hit the hardest? Whichever member of the family was already the most marginal, of course! In this case, daughters. #NBERday

The next paper is only indirectly about births. But it IS about families. Q: Does aging reduce growth? Can that be prevented? A: Yes it does, and.... maybe? #NBERday https://www.nber.org/papers/w25498 

This paper is a complicated formal model of a type that is not my expertise. But *basically* they show that you can describe peoples' behavior decently well by assuming young people derive some utility from informal, uncompensated care of their elders. #NBERday

But, as the number of elders rises, and especially sick elders, and as there are fewer young people, the demands on young peoples' uncompensated time rise, while each elder gets less time. Everybody is poorer and also lonelier. #NBERday

However, if you can reduce the disease burden among elders, everybody is a LITTLE bit richer but a LOT bit happier. SO the model says. The model assumes UN medium-variant population change. #NBERday

The authors suggest compensating informal elder care could be greatly welfare-improving. Basically: pay people to hang out with their grandparents and take care of them. Okay. I get that. I agree elder care is important. Buuuuuuut.... #NBERday

I think the model has a big problem. It assumes the rate of population growth is fixed, when it isn't. Notably curing Alzheimers, the central question of the paper would save a large number of elder lives. The elder share of the population would grow more. #NBERday

For a while, the total disease burden among elders would fall. Yay! But *something kills you eventually*. The disease burden would eventually rise again. #NBERday

The key here is the authors assume a steady state after 2096, and assume no population feedback. But if we actually extend elder lifespans, boosting elder population, and unchain the 2096 steady state, my guess is their cautious optimism falls apart. #NBERday

Because they aren't looking at population's dynamic response, it strikes me that they also miss that the actual fix here isn't paying young people to hang with olds. It's just making more youngs through births or immigration. #NBERday