The burgeoning use of ordinal data throughout the Empirical Sciences calls for location and variation measurement instruments suitable for such data environments. Neither Pearson’s Coefficient of Variation nor the Sharpe Ratio, relative variation comparison workhorses in cardinal worlds, are...

This paper examines the growth effect of one of the largest nutrition assistance programs in early life. The program covers 5.8 million children in poor rural China and provides 6-24-month old children with a free nutrition supplement that contains nine essential micronutrients. We utilize a...

This paper attempts to identify the climatic effect on birth outcomes in Brazil and, thus, to predict the potential impact of climate change. Panel data models indicate that excess and lack of rainfall have the most important harmful effects on newborns' health; temperature stresses and low...

This study explores the impact of air pollution on adverse birth outcomes. The study focuses on the effect of breathable particulate matter with diameter of 10 micrometers or less (PM10) on the likelihood of premature birth and low birth weight (LBW). The study exploits the fact that in 2011 the...

I review the evidence on access to water and sanitation infrastructure and child outcomes In Latin America. I show that there are large differences in access across countries and, within countries, between households living in urban and rural areas. Many papers in the public health literature...

This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth using a natural experiment in Switzerland. We leverage the fact that refugees arriving in Switzerland originate from places that have large shares of French (or Italian) speakers for...

The relationship between physical activity and child health and development is well-documented, yet the extant literature provides limited causal insight into the amount of physical activity considered optimal for improving any given health or developmental outcome. This paper exploits exogenous...

We study how prenatal maternal stress, caused by sustained seismic activity, affects birth outcomes in Chile during the period 2011-2015. A mother-fixed-effect model together with the spatiotemporal variation of earthquakes in Chile allow us to deal with identification issues that have obscured...

This paper is one of the first to examine the associations between prenatal sunshine exposure and birth outcomes, specifically the incidence of low birth weight (LBW) and small for gestational age (SGA), based on a nationally representative birth record dataset in China. During the sample period...