Well-Being of Children.

The NBER's Program on the Well-Being of Children, directed by Jonathan Gruber of MIT, met in Cambridge on April 5. The following papers were discussed:

Bruce Sacerdote, NBER and Dartmouth College, "The Nature and Nurture of Economic Outcomes" (NBER Working Paper No. 7949)

David N. Figlio, NBER and University of Florida, and Maurice E. Lucas, Alachua County School Board, "Do High Grading Standards Affect Students Performance?" (NBER Working Paper No. 7985)

Paul J. Gertler, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, and Simone Boyce, University of California, Berkeley, "An Experiment in Incentive-Based Welfare: The Impact of PROGRESA on Health in Mexico"

Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, India Institute of Management, and Esther Duflo, NBER and MIT, "Women's Leadership and Policy Decisions: Evidence From a Nationwide Randomized Experiment in India"

Joseph G. Altonji and Christopher R. Taber, NBER and Northwestern University, and Todd E. Elder, Northwestern University, "Selection on Observed and Unobserved Variables: Assessing the Effectiveness of Catholic Schools" (NBER Working Paper No. 7831)

Anne Case and Christina Paxson, NBER and Princeton University, and Darren Lubotsky, Princeton University, "Economic Status and Health in Childhood: The Origins of the Gradient"

Sacerdote uses data on adopted children to examine the treatment effects of family environment on childrens' educational and labor market outcomes. He uses four datasets containing information on adopted children, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. In at least two of the four, the mechanism for assigning children to adoptive parents is fairly random and does not match children to adoptive parents based on health, race, or ability. Sacerdote finds that adoptive parents' education and income have a modest impact on child test scores but a large impact on college attendance, marital status, and earnings. In contrast with other work on IQ scores, he does not find that the influence of adoptive parents declines with child age.

Figlio and Lucas explore the effects of high grading standards on student test performance in elementary school. This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the effects of grading standards, measured at the teacher level. Using an exceptionally rich set of data including every third, fourth, and fifth grader in a large school district over four years, the authors match students' gains in test scores and their disciplinary problems to...