This paper examines the effectiveness of a national, low-cost, demand-side vaccine policy—federal vaccine recommendations. We study the 2008 and 2010 influenza vaccine recommendations, the spillover effects of the 2009 H1N1 recommendation on influenza vaccination, and heterogeneous impacts across individual characteristics. Using 2004–2015 National Health Interview Survey data, policy effectiveness is estimated using Linear Probability Models and fixed effects. The 2008 and 2010 recommendations increased influenza vaccination by 20.9–26.5% among children and 5.2–6.6% among older adults. The 2009 H1N1 recommendation produced a positive spillover, raising influenza vaccination by 5.7–9.8% among younger adults. Despite these gains, vaccination rates remained lowest among the uninsured, low-income populations, racial and ethnic minorities, men, and adults with low education.

This paper examines the impact of the narrowing US gender wage gap on fertility during 1980–2010, when women’s wages increased from under 50\% to over 65\% of men’s and fertility remained below the 2.1 replacement rate. To identify causal estimates, I use a Bartik-style shift–share measure of relative potential wages by interacting pre-1970 industry–occupation shares with current national wage growth, generating plausibly exogenous variation. Using IPUMS Census and ACS microdata for women of childbearing age across all U.S. states, I find that a 10 percentage point increase in the female-to-male potential wage ratio has the following effects: (i) lowers the motherhood rate by 4 percentage points, (ii) reduces the average number of children per woman by about 0.7, and (iii) delays first births by over three years. I also investigates several potential mechanisms and find that higher female relative wages reduce marriage rates, raise the opportunity cost of motherhood, weaken household specialization, and increase women’s bargaining power.

This study investigates the impact of early childhood exposure to unilateral divorce laws (UDL) as a framework for understanding childhood shocks and their influence on intimate partner violence (IPV) in adulthood. Using data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) from 2000–2015, combined with state divorce regulations, we find that individuals aged 0–10 at the time of the reforms are 0.18 percentage points more likely to experience IPV in adulthood than older cohorts and those in states without UDL. Additionally, we examine how childhood exposure to UDL influences IPV victimization through its effects on education and employment outcomes.

This study examines the intergenerational effects of teenage pregnancy by investigating whether a mother’s teenage pregnancy influences her daughter’s likelihood of becoming a teenage mother. Using an instrumental variables approach, I employ policy shocks such as unilateral divorce laws as instruments. These policy changes are assumed to have affected the likelihood of a mother’s teenage pregnancy but have no direct influence on the daughter’s pregnancy except through the mother’s experience. I use restricted data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) and the NLSY79 Young Adult and Children datasets, which allow me to track the daughters of NLSY79 mothers and their teenage pregnancy outcomes. Preliminary results using the publicly available NLSY data show that having a mother who experienced teenage pregnancy increases the probability of the daughter also becoming a teenage mother by approximately 13.5 percentage points.

The gender gap in higher education has reversed over the past several decades, with women now comprising a substantial majority of college graduates. This paper investigates the implications of this shift for marriage market dynamics by examining how the declining ratio of college-educated men to women affects marriage rates among college educated women. To estimate the causal impact, we implement an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that exploits variation in state-level funding cuts to public colleges, an exogenous shock that influenced gender-specific college enrollment patterns but is plausibly unrelated to marriage decisions. In the first stage, we use data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to predict changes in the female-to-male college enrollment and completion ratios driven by these funding reductions. In the second stage, we link these predicted values to marriage outcomes using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). The findings indicate that a relative decline in the availability of similarly educated men significantly reduces marriage rates among college-educated women, highlighting how shifts in educational attainment can constrain partner availability and alter patterns of union formation.