Professor Adriana Lleras-Muney receives R01 Grant from the National Institute of Health for her research project “The Effect of Childhood Environments on Adult Health and Mortality”. “In the project, Professor Lleras-Muney constructs a new dataset linking individual childhood environments at a granular level to individual life spans for large representative samples of Blacks and Whites. She follows the approaches of previous work to investigate the causal effects of childhood environments on longevity.She focuses on two important areas with the potential to have large and long lasting effects on health and longevity: school and the disease environments. To estimate the impacts of school, she uses newly digitized data at the city level on the determinants of school quality (e.g. teacher pay) and follows previous approaches in the literature, but estimates them at the city level and tracks mortality outcomes for the entire lifetime of individuals. To estimate the causal effects of childhood infections, she will build on existing evidence that there was an important reduction in infectious disease mortality in cities in the 1920s due to reduced immigration and the associated improvement in living conditions that prevailed in cities. She will conduct the analysis separately by race. She will also examine the interaction of the childhood education environment and infectious disease environment on longevity and their joint effects on racial disparities.”