Dynamic Aspects of of Children's Health, Intellectual Development, and Family Economic Status

This paper is an empirical investigation of childhood and adolescent health and cognitive development as determined by family economic variables. The model proposed recognizes that these processes may be jointly dependent, and may in part be determined by common unobserved factors; these factors may also be correlated with the observed family economic variables. A two-factor model is estimated using panel data, and the results indicate that when such factors are taken account of, family income is estimated to have no significant influence on health and cognitive development, but parents' education a strong positive influence.

An Exploration of the Dynamic Relationship between Health and Cognitive Development in Adolescence

This paper is an empirical exploration of the dynamic relationship between health and cognitive development in a longitudinal data set compiled from two nationally representative cross-sections of children. Our results indicate that there is feedback both from health to cognitive development and from cognitive development to health, but the latter of these relationships is stronger. They also indicate that estimates of family background effects taken from the dynamic model -- which can be assumed to be less influenced by genetic factors are smaller than their cross-sectional counterparts, but some still remain statistically significant. The first finding calls attention to the existence of a continuing inter-action between health and cognitive development over the life cycle. The second finding suggests that nurture "matters" in cognitive development and health outcomes.

Do Wages Rise with Job Seniority?

Many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority (tenure) on wag es. This paper reexamines the evidence using a simple instrumental va riables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be rela ted to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage. The main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small and that general labor market experience and job shopping ac count for most wage growth over a career. The strong cross section re lationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias. Copyright 1987 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.