In 1973, the Indonesian government began one of the largest school construction programs ever. We use 2016 nationally representative data to examine the long-term and intergenerational effects of additional schooling as a child. We use a difference-in-differences identification strategy...

This paper investigates the economic returns to parental health. To account for potential endogeneity between parental health and child outcomes, we leverage longitudinal microdata from Indonesia to estimate individual fixed effects models. Our results show that the economic returns to parental...

Between 1973 and 1978, the Indonesian Government constructed over 61,000 primary schools throughout the country. This is one of the largest school construction programs on record. I evaluate the effect of this program on education and wages by combining differences across regions in the number...

In several countries temporary terms of trade improvements have led to a deterioration of the current account. Furthermore, many of these countries failed to attain greater post-boom growth rates. The point we make is that the structure of the fiscal process is critical in determining outcomes....

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance....

We estimate the aggregate productivity gains from reducing barriers to internal labor migration in Indonesia, accounting for worker selection and spatial differences in human capital. We distinguish between movement costs, which mean workers will only move if they expect higher wages, and...

Human capital, including health and nutrition, has played a key role in the literature on poverty traps. Economic shocks that affect human capital during early life are thought to translate into permanently reduced levels of human capital and, thereby, push individuals into poverty. Three...

We examine the generalizability of internally valid estimates of causal effects in a fixed population over time when that population is subject to aggregate shocks. This temporal external validity is shown to depend upon the distribution of the aggregate shocks and the interaction between these...

Taller workers earn more, particularly in lower income settings. It has been argued that adult height is a marker of strength which is rewarded in the labor market, a proxy for cognitive performance or other dimensions of human capital such as school quality, a proxy for health status or a proxy...

Whereas studies have established the intra-household distribution of resources affects allocation decisions, little is known about how these decisions are affected by the distribution of resources among co-resident and non co-resident extended family members. Drawing on theoretical models of...