Douglas Almond

Affiliations and Contact Information

• Department: Economics
• Email: da2152@columbia.edu
• Office phone: 212-854-3239
• Personal Webpage: http://www.nber.org/~almond/

Areas of Interest and Expertise

Interests

• His research focuses on early childhood health, prenatal health in particular. He aims to evaluate health-related hypotheses with "severe" implications, i.e. implications very unlikely were the hypothesis were not true. One such hypothesis is that of "fetal origins", which posits that prenatal health is especially important in determining later-life outcomes. When combined with a fetal health shock of well-defined duration, the fetal origins hypothesis predicts abrupt changes in outcomes by birth cohort. This pattern in adult outcomes has been observed to correspond to two well-defined fetal health shocks: maternal infection by the 1918 influenza virus and prenatal exposure to fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in Sweden.

Applied Statistics Center Projects

Principal Investigator

• The impact of the Food Stamp Program on infant outcomes