bergs decision might have puzzled some people in show business circles, where it is a time-honored tradition to change Jewish names.   Thus did Issur Danielovitch become Kirk Douglas; thus did the William Morris Agency rise to prominence under its namesake, the former Zelman Moses. The question is, would Zelman Moses have done as well had he not become William Morris? And would DeShawn Williams do any better if he called himself Jake Williams or Connor Williams? It is tempting to think so-just as it is tempting to think that a truckload of childrens books will make a child smarter. Though the audit studies cant be used to truly measure how much a name matters, the California names data can. How? The California data included not only each babys vital sta- tistics but information about the mothers level of education, income and, most significantly, her own date of birth. This last fact made it possible to identify the hundreds of thousands of California mothers who had themselves been born in California and then to link them to their own birth records. Now a new and extremely potent story emerged from the data: it was possible to track the life outcome of any individual woman. This is the sort of data chain that researchers dream about, making it possible to identify a set of children who were born under similar circumstances, then locate them again twenty or thirty years later to see how they turned out. Among the hundreds of thousands of such women in the California data, many bore distinc- tively black names and many others did not. Using regression analysis to control for other factors that might influence life trajectories, it was then possible to measure the impact of a single factor-in this case, a womans first name-on her educational, income, and health out- comes. So does a name matter? The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively