Cohort Studies.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER's Working Group on Cohort Studies, directed by Dora Costa of University of California, Los Angeles, met in California on April 11. These papers were discussed:

Eric D. Gould, Hebrew University; Victor Lavy, Hebrew University and NBER; and M. Daniele Paserman, Boston University and NBER, "Sixty Years after the Magic Carpet Ride: The Long-Run Effect of the Early Childhood Environment on Social and Economic Outcomes"(see "Labor Studies" earlier in this issue for a description of this paper)

Louis Cain, Loyola University, and Sok Chul Hong, University of Chicago, "Survival in 19th Century Cities: The Larger the City, the Smaller Your Chances"

Robert A. Pollak, Washington University and NBER, and Janice Compton, University of Manitoba, "Intergenerational Transfers and the Proximity of Adult Children to their Parents"

Stefania Albanesi, Columbia University and NBER, and Claudia Olivetti, Boston University, "Gender Roles and Technological Progress"(NBER Working Paper No. 13179)

Valerie A. Ramey, University of California, San Diego and NBER, "Time Spent in Home Production in the 20th Century: New Estimates from Old Data"

Raquel Fernandez, New York University and NBER, "Culture as Learning: The Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation over a Century" (NBER Working Paper No. 13373)

Ulrike Malmendier, University of California, Berkeley and NBER, and Stefan Nagel, Stanford University and NBER, "Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk-Taking?"

Although it is widely known that, during the nineteenth century, life expectancy was substantially lower in cities than in rural areas, the difference in survival rates by urban size and rural environmental characteristics is less widely known. Further, the longitudinal impact of lifetime mobility on life expectancy during this period rarely has been studied. Cain and Hong examine these less explored subjects using historical data on Union Army veterans' lifetime socioeconomic and health records collected by the Center for Population Economics. In particular, they estimate the differentials in survival rate by urban size at three stages of life: birth, late adolescence, and death. They also exploit the association between rural area survival rates and the local malaria ecology to differentiate rural areas. Their survival analyses show a significant hierarchy in survival rates by urban size, which is consistent for all the stages of lifetime. The results of geographical mobility...