This study explores the effects of exposure to regular paternal childcare (without the mother present) in the first three years of life on the academic and social capabilities of boys and girls when they begin school. Innovations in this paper are the use of data on children’s early attributes...

This paper draws on the economics literature on market labour supply and the sociology literature on domestic labour supply. Each literature has explored the factors underlying male specialisation in market work and female specialisation in domestic work, but has tended to focus on labour supply...

The research on intergenerational correlations in outcomes is increasingly moving from measurement into assessment of causal transmission mechanisms. This paper analyses the causal impact of fathers’ job loss on their children’s educational attainment and later economic outcomes. To do so,...

This paper investigates whether the religious identity of state legislators in India influences development outcomes, both for citizens of their religious group and for the population as a whole. To allow politician identity to be correlated with constituency level voter preferences or events...

There is relatively little research on peer effects in teenage motherhood despite the fact that peer effects, and in particular social interaction within the family, are likely to be important. We estimate the impact of an elder sister’s teenage fertility on the teenage childbearing of their...

This paper uses the 1980 famine in Karamoja, Uganda, as a natural experiment to evaluate its possible long‐lasting cognitive and health effects. Results indicate a strong negative impact on the educational attainment of adults exposed to the famine in utero or infancy. They were less likely to...

This paper presents the first estimates of the causal effect of facilities for prenatal sex diagnosis on the sex ratio at birth in India. It conducts a triple difference analysis across cohort, birth order and sex of previous births. Treated births are those that occur after prenatal sex...

Family income is found to be more closely related to sons’ earnings for a cohort born in 1970 compared to one born in 1958. This result is in stark contrast to the finding on the basis of social class; intergenerational mobility for this outcome is found to be unchanged. Our aim here is to...

The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity...

A large literature uses parental evaluations of child health status to provide evidence on the socioeconomic determinants of health. If how parents perceive health questions differs by income or education level, then estimates of the socioeconomic gradient are likely to be biased and potentially...