Women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men. In monogamous societies with divorce and remarriage, fecund women are relatively scarce. This paper studies how parents, who maximize discounted dynastic consumption, invest in the survival of their sons and daughters. The theory...

Three quarters of all violence against women is perpetrated by domestic partners. I study both the economic causes and consequences of domestic violence. I find that decreases in the male-female wage gap reduce violence against women, consistent with a household bargaining model. The...

This paper estimates the effects of maternal malnutrition exploiting the 1959-1961 Chinese famine as a natural experiment. In the 1% sample of the 2000 Chinese Census, we find that fetal exposure to acute maternal malnutrition had compromised a range of socioeconomic outcomes, including:...

Conflict between and within countries can have lasting health and economic consequences, but identifying such effects can be empirically challenging. This paper uses household survey data from Eritrea to estimate the effect of exposure to the 1998–2000 Eritrea–Ethiopia war on children's...

This paper uses quasi-experimental variation from federal tax reform to evaluate the effect of the EITC on infant health outcomes. We find that the EITC reduces the incidence of low birth weight and increases mean birth weight: a $1,000 treatment-on-the-treated leads to a 2 to 3 percent decline...

To link environmental factors with prevalence of RTI/STD symptoms among women in the urban slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh and also to investigate if there are differences in levels of RTI/STD prevalence among the slums. Fourteen slums from Dhaka city were the secondary units for this study,...

This study extends extant research on prenatal care and birthweight to the South American country of Uruguay. The data represent a population of poor women from a less-developed country with a health care system that provides both prenatal and obstetric care free of charge. We find a positive...