Cohort Studies.

• Position: Bureau News

The NBER's Working Group on Cohort Studies, directed by Dora Costa of MIT, met in Cambridge on March 24. These papers were discussed:

Robert A. Pollak, Washington University and NBER; Liliana E. Pezzin, Medical College of Wisconsin; and Barbara S. Schone, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, "Long-Term Care of the Disabled Elderly: Do Children Increase Caregiving by Spouses?"

Hoyt Bleakley, University of Chicago, "Malaria in the Americas: A Retrospective Analysis of Childhood Exposure"

Werner Troesken, University of Pittsburgh and NBER, and Karen Clay, Carnegie Mellon University, "Deprivation and Disease in Early Twentieth- Century America"

Chulhee Lee, Seoul National University, "Socioeconomic Differences in Wartime Morbidity and Mortality of Black Union Army Soldiers"

Do adult children influence the care that elderly parents provide for each other? Pezzin, Pollak, and Schone develop two models in which the anticipated behavior of adult children provides incentives for elderly parents to increase care for their disabled spouses. The "demonstration effect" assumes that children learn from a parent's example that family caregiving is appropriate behavior. For the "punishment effect," if the nondisabled spouse fails to provide spousal care, then children may respond by not providing future care for the nondisabled spouse when necessary. Joint children act as a commitment mechanism, increasing the probability that elderly spouses will provide care; stepchildren may provide weaker incentives for spousal care. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, the authors find some evidence that spouses provide more care when they have children with strong parental attachment.

Bleakley considers the malaria-eradication campaigns in the United States (circa 1920), and in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (circa 1955), with a specific goal of measuring how much childhood exposure to malaria depresses labor productivity. These eradication campaigns happened because of advances in medical and public-health knowledge, which mitigates concerns about reverse causality of the timing of eradication efforts. Bleakley collects data from regional malaria eradication programs and collates them with publicly available census data. Malarious areas saw large drops in their malaria incidence following the campaign. In both absolute terms and relative to those in non-malarious areas, the cohorts born after eradication had higher income as adults than the...