In this project, Aizer and Dal Bó find that policies that compel prosecution even if the victim later wishes to drop charges result in an increase in reporting and a decrease in the number of men murdered by intimates. These surprising results are shown to be implications of a model in which victims have time-inconsistent preferences.

Aizer is looking at the long-run effects of the Mother’s Pension program, which was established as early as 1911 in some states, and is the first government-sponsored welfare program in the U.S. It was designed to improve the conditions of young children that had become dependent through the loss or disability of the breadwinner. Because of the program’s historical nature, she can investigate the long-term effects of cash transfers to low-income families on a variety of outcomes, including educational attainment and earnings.

Aizer, along with Laura Stroud in Community Health, is examining the role of the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on maternal smoking in changing smoking behavior during pregnancy and how these changes spread across educational groups. Their results suggest that not only were the educated more responsive to the initial announcement but, consistent with a peer-effects model, smoking reductions among the educated were more dramatic in areas of high educational segregation.

Aizer (in collaboration with Laura Stroud and Stephen Buka in Community Health) explores the effects of maternal stress on child outcomes using a unique longitudinal data set. She finds that cortisol levels of low SES mothers are both higher on average and more variable, suggesting that prenatal stress may play an important role in explaining why relatively few children born into poverty are able to escape it as adults.

Aizer applies economic models of bargaining and econometric techniques to estimate the causes and consequences of domestic violence. Aizer shows that there is a negative causal relationship between violence during pregnancy and newborn health, exploiting for identification variation in the enforcement of laws against domestic violence. Her findings show that a decrease in the male-female wage gap can improve the health of women via reductions in violence.