Simple plots of data show that malaria has a negative correlation with national income per capita, whether looking across countries at a point in time, or looking at a single country over time. Some countries have been able to move from an equilibrium characterized by low income and high...

We estimate a directional distance function to assess the impacts of multiple time-varying parent and child inputs on a cluster of jointly produced child outcomes for children aged 7 to 13 years. The directional distance function specification avoids several well-known empirical problems...

Using a unique dataset of 703,287 farm operators from the Taiwanese Census of Agriculture merged to administrative records from the National Farmers' Health Insurance (FHI) program, we examine the effects of the enrollment in the FHI program on farmers’ on- and off-farm labor supply and the...

This paper is based on an ongoing joint work with David Sahn and Xiaobo Zhang.

This paper measures inequality of opportunity in adult health in Colombia employing the 2010 Living Standards and Social Mobility Survey. I study the relationship between childhood circumstances and health status in adulthood drawing on Roemer (1998)'s analytical approach to inequality of...

Xi Chen acknowledges generous Doctoral Research Grant from the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University and precious data set provided by the Development Strategy and Governance Division at IFPRI. Conference Travel Grant provided by the Department of Applied Economics and...

This paper examines the relationship between nutrition and rural labor productivity using height and calorie intake as measures of nutrition and health status. The study is based on data from a survey of 956 households conducted in Bangladesh between 1996 and 1997. The paper focuses on adult...

This paper examines women’s and men’s decisions to participate in physical activity and to attain a healthy weight. These outcomes are hypothesized to be related to prices of food, drink and health care services and products, the respondent’s personal characteristics (such as education,...

Childhood stunting among preschool-age children stands as a serious public health problem to be addressed in Nepal. Applying the multi-level modeling approach to nationally representative data, in the overall, we provide evidence that the negative influence of maternal own education to childhood...