Substantial work has demonstrated that early nutrition and home environments, including the degree to which children receive cognitive stimulation and emotional support from parents, play a profound role in influencing early childhood development. Yet, less work has documented the joint...

This paper undertakes two calculations, one for all developing countries, the other for 34 developing countries that together account for 90 percent of the world's stunted children. The first calculation asks how much lower a country's per capita income is today as a result of some of its...

Unexpected adverse events that affect areas or populations widely (covariate shocks) can have major consequences for the welfare of a society. Although the negative effects on households, especially among the poor, are well established in the economics literature, fewer studies have focused on...

Nearly one in three children under age five in the Philippines is stunted, a key marker of undernutrition. This rate is high for the country's level of income. This paper provides the first detailed multivariate analysis of potential drivers of stunting in the Philippines, using data from the...

Using recent Demographic Health Survey data for Bangladesh and the neighboring Indian states of Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, this paper reexamines the determinants of child wasting and maternal anemia. The findings bear out the importance of commonly cited factors, such as mother's...