In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray (Anderson and Ray, 2010) develop and apply a new ‘flow’ measure of ‘missing women’ to estimate the extent of gender bias in mortality in developing countries. Contrary to the existing literature, they find...

Almost nine million children under five years of age die every year. Diarrhea is considered to be the second leading cause of under-five mortality in developing countries. About one out of five deaths is caused by diarrhea. In this paper, we use the newly available data set DLHS-3 to quantify...

Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...

For more than a hundred years, advances in development were associated with decreasing fertility rates. This led to total fertility rates far below replacement level in most developed countries. However, during the last decade fertility rates started to increase again in various developed...

We investigate to what extent convergence in production levels per worker has been achieved in Germany since unification. To this end, we model the distribution of GDP per employee across German districts using two-component normal mixtures. While in the first year after unification, the two...

In medieval times, most people identified with religious values and aggregate income and productivity grew at glacier speed. In the 20th century, religion played a much lesser role in daily life and income and productivity grew at high and unprecedented rates. The present paper develops a simple...