Discussion of growing inequity in U.S. life expectancy increasingly focuses on the popularized narrative that it is driven by a surge of “deaths of despair.” Does this narrative fit the empirical evidence? Using census and Vital Statistics data, we apply life-table methods to calculate cause-specific years of life lost between ages 25 and 84 by sex and educational rank for non-Hispanic blacks and whites in 1990 and 2015. Drug overdoses do contribute importantly to widening inequity for whites, especially men, but trivially for blacks. The contribution of suicide to growing inequity is unremarkable. Cardiovascular disease, non-lung cancers, and other internal causes are key to explaining growing life expectancy inequity. Results underline the speculative nature of attempts to attribute trends in life-expectancy inequity to an epidemic of despair. They call for continued investigation of the possible weathering effects of tenacious high-effort coping with chronic stressors on the health of marginalized populations.

This paper evaluates the long-run effects of Head Start using large-scale, restricted administrative data. Using the county roll-out of Head Start between 1965 and 1980 and age-eligibility cutoffs for school entry, we find that Head Start generated large increases in adult human capital and economic self-sufficiency, including a 0. 65-year increase in schooling, a 2.7 percent increase in high school completion, an 8.5 percent increase in college enrollment, and a 39 percent increase in college completion. These estimates imply sizable, long-term returns to investments in means-tested, public preschool programs. (JEL I21, I26, I28, I38, J24)

Research on public health insurance expansions has typically focused on those targeted by the expansions; we estimate the spillover effects of parental Medicaid expansions on the insurance coverage of their children. Expanding parental Medicaid eligibility may increase participation by already‐eligible, uninsured children by increasing the value of Medicaid enrollment for the entire family. However, parental expansions may also generate crowd out from private coverage. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation during a period of major parental Medicaid expansions, we find substantial effects of the expansions on the Medicaid participation of children, with evidence of crowd out among some subsamples. (JEL H51, I13, I38)

The project's primary data source is the 2000 Census and 2001 to 2018 ACS combined with the SSA's Numident file, accessed through project 1284 in the University of Michigan Research Data Center (RDC). The advantage of these data is that they link a rich set of productivity outcomes for cohorts potentially benefitting from War on Poverty programs (those who are ages 25 to 54 in the Census/ACS) with information on their access to Head Start programs in childhood using Numident information on county of birth. The 2000 Census long-form contains information on 16.7 percent of the U.S. population; the 2001 to 2018 ACSs contain information for around 14 percent of the U.S. population. The number of Numidentlinked, unique individuals in these combined data sources represent about one-quarter of the U.S. population. In addition, we use the 1970 restricted long-form Census that contains information on school enrollment for children. Unfortunately, these data cannot be linked to the Numident because they have not yet been PIK'd by the Census.

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