Seth Sanders

Early assessment of the relationship between the COVID-19 pandemic and births in high-income countries

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 245 citations

Drawing on past pandemics, scholars have suggested that the COVID-19 pandemic will bring about fertility decline. Evidence from actual birth data has so far been scarce. This brief report uses data on vital statistics from a selection of high-income countries, including the United States. The pandemic has been accompanied by a significant drop in crude birth rates beyond that predicted by past trends in 7 out of the 22 countries considered, with particularly strong declines in southern Europe: I…

Deconstructing bias in social preferences reveals groupy and not-groupy behavior

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2020 · 64 citations

Group divisions are a continual feature of human history, with biases toward people's own groups shown in both experimental and natural settings. Using a within-subject design, this paper deconstructs group biases to find significant and robust individual differences; some individuals consistently respond to group divisions, while others do not. We examined individual behavior in two treatments in which subjects make pairwise decisions that determine own and others' incomes. In a political treat…

Estimating the Effect of School Quality on Mortality in the Presence of Migration: Evidence from the Jim Crow South

Journal of Labor Economics · 2020-05-04 · 19 citations

How does school quality affect health amid multiple behavioral responses? The Rosenwald schools transformed school quality for rural southern African Americans in the early 1900s. Research shows that the schools made black migration northward more likely and that the Great Migration shortened life expectancy for these migrants. Besides the hypothesized health-enhancing effects of school quality, negative health effects might also occur through migration. We disentangle behavioral mechanisms and…

COVID‐19 Policy Interventions and Fertility Dynamics in the Context of Pre‐Pandemic Welfare Support

Population and Development Review · 2023-04-28 · 14 citations

Abstract This paper focuses on nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to explain fertility dynamics during the pandemic, while considering countries’ institutional context. We argue that containment policies disrupted people's lives and increased their uncertainty more in countries with weak welfare support systems, while health‐related and economic support NPIs mitigated such disruptions much more there, as they were less expected by citizens. We estimate monthly “excess” crude birth rates (CBR…

Human Capital Investment

2020-01-01 · 6 citations