A long literature in demography debates the importance of place for health. This paper assesses whether the importance of dense settlement for child mortality and child height is moderated by exposure to local sanitation behavior. Is open defecation, without a toilet or latrine, worse for infant...

Few papers in the literature provide quantitative analysis of the difficult circumstances faced by children of short-term labour migrants. This article uses new survey data from rural northwest India to study both children who migrate and those left behind. It finds that, unlike in other...

The Janani Suraksha Yojana, India's “safe motherhood program,” is a conditional cash transfer to encourage women to give birth in health facilities. Despite the program's apparent success in increasing facility-based births, quantitative evaluations have not found corresponding improvements...

Height is a marker for health, cognitive ability and economic productivity. Recent research on the determinants of height suggests that postneonatal mortality predicts height because it is a measure of the early life disease environment to which a cohort is exposed. This article advances the...

Physical height is an important economic variable reflecting health and human capital. Puzzlingly, however, differences in average height across developing countries are not well explained by differences in wealth. In particular, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa...

Early life health and net nutrition shape childhood and adult cognitive skills and human capital. In poor countries-and especially in South Asia-widespread open defecation without making use of a toilet or latrine is an important source of childhood disease. This paper studies the effects on...