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Increasingly, social scientists are turning to childhood to gain a better understanding of the fundamental social causes of adult mortality. However, evidence of the link between childhood and the mortality of adults is fragmentary, and the intervening mechanisms remain unclear. Drawing on the National Longitudinal Survey of Older Men, our analysis shows that men's mortality is associated with an array of childhood conditions, including socioeconomic status, family living arrangements, mother's work status, rural residence, and parents' nativity. With the exception of parental nativity, socioeconomic-achievement processes in adulthood and lifestyle factors mediated these associations. Education, family income, household wealth, and occupation mediated the influence of socioeconomic status in childhood. Adult lifestyle factors, particularly body mass, mediated the effects of family living arrangements in childhood, mother's work status, and rural residence. Our findings bring into sharp focus the idea that economic and educational policies that are targeted at children's well-being are implicitly health policies with effects that reach far into the adult life course.

I use an organizational learning perspective to examine how the nature, performance and timing of a firm's acquisition experience helps it to learn how to select the right acquisition. I predict the performance of 214 acquisitions made by 120 firms in 6 industries between 1990 and 1995. Results show that a firm's focal acquisition performance positively relates to prior acquisitions that are a) not highly similar or dissimilar to the focal acquisition, b) associated with small losses and c) not too temporally close to or distant from the focal acquisition. Taken together, these results identify the broad conditions in which firms generate adaptive and timely inferences from acquisition experience. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper develops a hubris theory of entrepreneurship to explain why so many new ventures are created in the shadow of high venture failure rates: More confident actors are moved to start ventures, and then act on such confidence when deciding how to allocate resources in their ventures. Building on theory and evidence from the behavioral decision-making literature, we describe how founders' socially constructed confidence affects the manner in which they interpret information about their prior and current ventures. We then link founders' propensity to be overconfident to their decisions to allocate, use, and attain resources. In our model, founders with greater socially constructed confidence tend to deprive their ventures of resources and resourcefulness and, therefore, increase the likelihood that their ventures will fail.confidence, hubris, entrepreneurship, resources

We extend the concept of celebrity from the individual to the firm level of analysis and argue that the high level of public attention and the positive emotional responses that define celebrity increase the economic opportunities available to a firm. We develop a theoretical framework explaining how the media construct firm celebrity by creating a "dramatized reality" in reporting on industry change and firms' actions. Firms contribute to this process by taking nonconforming actions and proactively seeking to manage impressions about themselves.

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survive to old age, their mortality rates converge toward those for older whites, although blacks remain disadvantaged (Elo and Preston 1994).The racial gap in mortality during the prime adult ages points to the need to understand chronic health problems of middleaged blacks and whites. Middle age, defined here as ages 51 to 63, designates the lifecycle period when the racial gap in health is potentially at its greatest (House et al. 1994). Our overall goal is to identify racial differences in "life without health problems" to better specify the pathways that lead to racial differences in mortality and to differences in the quality of life lived. We define health problems broadly to include the major fatal and nonfatal chronic diseases, conditions, and impairments, functional difficulty, and disability.Two basic questions guide our analysis. First, are blacks consistently disadvantaged relative to whites across all major chronic eath truncates the lives of black Americans at younger ages than whites, with greater racial differences observed for men than women. National life table estimates for 1996 predict a life expectancy at birth for black men of 66 years compared with almost 74 years for white men (Ventura et al. 1997). Much of this difference is due to the racial disparity in mortality rates prior to age 65. Should blacks D

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