About

Hannes Schwandt is an associate professor in the Department of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. He is a health economist and economic demographer whose research focuses on the relationship between economic factors and well-being. His work investigates how economic shocks and unemployment influence physical health, mortality, and fertility, as well as the long-term human capital effects resulting from adverse health exposures during prenatal development and early childhood. Schwandt joins Northwestern from the University of Zurich, bringing extensive expertise in understanding the economic determinants of health and human development.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Environmental health
• Emergency medicine
• Economics
• Pharmacology
• Social psychology
• Statistics
• Gerontology
• Waste management
• Anesthesia
• Virology
• Psychiatry
• Demography
• Medical emergency
• Natural resource economics
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Mathematics
• Chemistry

Selected publications

• Community Water Fluoridation and Birth Outcomes

  JAMA Network Open · 2026-01-20 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Importance: Community water fluoridation (CWF) is a widely implemented public health intervention aimed at preventing dental caries. However, concerns have emerged about potential unintended birth outcomes of fluoride exposure, particularly birth weight, which is a widely accepted summary measure of infant health and has been found to be associated with later-life health and human capital. Objective: To evaluate the association between prenatal exposure to CWF and birth outcomes. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study was conducted using an event-study analysis with a difference-in-differences (DID) approach that exploited the staggered rollout of CWF across US counties from January 1968 to December 1988. The study included birth outcomes from singleton births obtained from the National Vital Statistics System's Natality Detail Files. The analysis compared within-county changes in birth outcomes before and after the introduction of CWF, using counties that never fluoridated or had not yet fluoridated as the control. Data were analyzed between February 4 and October 28, 2025. Exposure: County-level CWF. Main Outcomes and Measures: The primary outcome was change in mean birth weight, and secondary outcomes were incidence of low birth weight (<2500 g), gestational length (weeks), and incidence of prematurity (gestational age <37 weeks). Community water fluoridation exposure was measured as the population-weighted share of county residents served by fluoridated water based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Fluoridation Census data. Results: The study sample included 11 479 922 singleton births (mean [SD] gestational age, 39.5 [0.8] weeks; 51.2% boys; mean [SD] birth weight, 3337.4 [172.8] g; highest mean [SD] maternal age proportions, 0.36 [0.13] aged 20-24 years and 0.27 [0.12] aged 25-29 years) across 677 counties (408 CWF treated [60.3%] and 269 [39.7%] never treated) over the 21-year period, aggregated to the county-month level. No evidence of an association of CWF with birth weight or other birth outcomes was found (DID estimate, -0.53; 95% CI, -4.75 to 3.70). Event-study estimates showed no discernible pretreatment trends and no significant changes following CWF adoption, with estimates small in magnitude across all posttreatment periods, ranging from -8.44 g (95% CI, -20.41 to 3.53 g) to 7.20 g (95% CI, -5.45 to 19.85 g). Findings were supported by sensitivity analyses incorporating state-specific time trends, alternative exposure thresholds, and tests for compositional changes in births. Conclusions and Relevance: This cohort study of more than 11 million births found no association of CWF with adverse birth outcomes. These findings provide reassurance about the safety of CWF during pregnancy and underscore the value of rigorous causal designs in evaluating potential adverse effects of public health interventions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Germs in the Family: The Short- and Long-Term Consequences of Intra-Household Disease Spread

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Trauma at School: The Impacts of Shootings on Students’ Human Capital and Economic Outcomes

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-05-05 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract We examine how shootings at schools—an increasingly common form of gun violence in the States—impact the educational and economic trajectories of students. Using linked schooling and labor market data in Texas from 1992 to 2018, we compare within-student and across-cohort changes in outcomes following a shooting to those experienced by students at matched control schools. We find that school shootings increase absenteeism and grade repetition, reduce high school graduation, college enrollment, and college completion; and reduce employment and earnings at ages 24–26 years. We further find school-level increases in the number of leadership staff and reductions in retention among teachers and teaching support staff in the years following a shooting. The adverse impacts of shootings span student characteristics, suggesting that the economic costs of school shootings are universal.

  PublisherDOI

• The Failure of Life Expectancy to Fully Rebound to Prepandemic Levels

  JAMA · 2025-07-09 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This study uses data from the California Comprehensive Death Files to examine how California life expectancy varied by year, income, race and ethnicity, and contributing causes of death after the COVID-19 pandemic.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Poverty and Health

  Annual Review of Economics · 2025-08-06 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access

  Poverty is strongly associated with worse health across countries and across individuals within countries. However, not all poor individuals suffer from poor health: The effects of poverty on health vary across place and time. In this review, we discuss the evidence documenting these patterns and the reasons for the associations. We then provide an overview of what is known about policies that may improve the health of the poor. We focus primarily on the modern-day United States, but we also discuss evidence from historical experiences and low- and middle-income countries. Throughout the article we discuss areas in need of future research.

  PublisherDOI

• Life Expectancy After the COVID-19 Pandemic—Reply

  JAMA · 2025-10-27

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Poverty and Health

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Lasting Impacts of School Shootings on Youth Psychotropic Drug Use

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2024-05-01 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  This paper estimates the effects of fatal school shootings on youth psychotropic drug use over the subsequent five and a half years. Using an event study approach that compares trends in drugs prescribed by providers practicing close to a school shooting relative to those practicing slightly farther away, we find that fatal school shootings lead to large increases in youth psychotropic drug use that persist for years after the event. These effects are driven primarily by increases in prescriptions for antid epressants and antipsychotics and are observed among both youths who were previously taking psychotropic medication and those who were not.

  PublisherDOI

• Poverty and Health

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-08-01 · 3 citations

  reportOpen access

  Poverty is strongly associated with worse health across countries and within countries across individuals.However, not all poor individuals suffer from poor health: the effects of poverty on health vary across place and time.In this review, we discuss the evidence documenting these patterns, and the reasons for the associations.We then provide an overview of what is known about policies that may improve the health of the poor.We focus primarily on the modern-day United States, but also discuss evidence from historical experiences and low-and middle-income countries.Throughout we discuss areas in need of future research.

  PublisherDOI

• The COVID-19 baby bump in the United States

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023-08-15 · 39 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  We use natality microdata covering the universe of US. births for 2015 to 2021 and California births from 2015 through February 2023 to examine childbearing responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that 60% of the 2020 decline in US fertility rates was driven by sharp reductions in births to foreign-born mothers although births to this group comprised only 22% of all US births in 2019. This decline started in January 2020. In contrast, the COVID-19 recession resulted in an overall "baby bump" among US-born mothers, which marked the first reversal in declining fertility rates since the Great Recession. Births to US-born mothers fell by 31,000 in 2020 relative to a prepandemic trend but increased by 71,000 in 2021. The data for California suggest that US births remained elevated through February 2023. The baby bump was most pronounced for first births and women under age 25, suggesting that the pandemic led some women to start families earlier. Above age 25, the baby bump was most pronounced for women aged 30 to 34 and women with a college education. The 2021 to 2022 baby bump is especially remarkable given the large declines in fertility rates that would have been projected by standard statistical models.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Janet Currie

  Princeton University

  76 shared

• Maya Rossin‐Slater

  Stanford University

  38 shared

• N. Meltem Daysal

  University of Copenhagen

  26 shared

• Hui Ding

  Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University

  25 shared

• Jörn‐Steffen Pischke

  Laser Scan Engineering (United Kingdom)

  22 shared

• Molly Schnell

  Hegau-Bodensee-Klinikum Singen

  20 shared

• Josselin Thuilliez

  Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management

  14 shared

• Amelie Wuppermann

  Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg

  11 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Education Policy and Leadership

  Northwestern University

  2008

• M.A., Education Policy and Social Inquiry

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2003

• B.A., Political Science

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2001