Adolescent Violent Delinquency Associated With Increased Emergency Department Usage in Young Adulthood

Limited research has examined the extent to which adolescent delinquency predicts healthcare usage in young adulthood, including emergency department (ED) visits. This study used data from 3,310 adolescents (52.05% female; mean age at Wave I = 16.04 years) from the sibling subsample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We examined whether adolescent delinquency at Wave I predicted ED visits at Wave III using sibling fixed effects models to adjust estimates for within-family unobserved heterogeneity. Increased violent, but not nonviolent, delinquency predicted a higher number of ED visits in early adulthood in the sibling fixed effects models. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between delinquency and ED usage using a sibling fixed effects design. Findings demonstrate that violent adolescent delinquency may increase healthcare usage and suggest the potential role of healthcare providers in improving outcomes for delinquent youth.

The Normativity of Marriage and the Marriage Premium for Children’s Outcomes

Children born to married parents have better health, behavioral, educational, and economic outcomes than children of unmarried mothers. This association, known as the "marriage premium," has been interpreted as emerging from the selectivity of parents who marry and from a positive effect of marriage. The authors suggest that the positive effect of marriage could be contextual, emerging from the normativity of marriage in society. They test this hypothesis using the case of Chile, where marital fertility dropped sharply from 66% of all births in 1990 to 27% in 2016. The authors find that the benefit of marriage for infant health was large in the early 1990s but declined as marital fertility became less normative in society, to fully disappear in 2016. Multivariate analysis of temporal variation, multilevel models of variation across place, sibling ?fixed effects models, and a falsification test consistently indicate that marriage has a beneficial effect when marital fertility is normative and a weak effect when is not. Generalizing from this case, the authors discuss contextual effects of diverse practices and statuses.

The Effects of Poor Neonatal Health on Children's Cognitive Development

We make use of a new data resource—merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002—to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development. Using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed effects models, we find that the effects of early health on cognitive development are essentially constant through the school career; that these effects are similar across a wide range of family backgrounds; and that they are invariant to measures of school quality. We conclude that the effects of early health on adult outcomes are therefore set very early. (JEL I12, J13, J24)