This paper examines the impact of fertilizer agrichemicals in water on infant and child health using data on water quality combined with data on the health outcomes of infants and children from the 1992-93, 1998-99, and 2005-06 Demographic and Health Surveys of India. Because fertilizers are...

Among countries with comparable levels of income, India has one of the more progressive disability policy frameworks; however, people with disabilities in India are subject to multiple disadvantages. This paper focuses on state-level variations in outcomes for people with disabilities to provide...

This paper develops a conceptual framework that can explain why economic development goes along with increases in body weight and obesity rates. We first introduce the concept of novelty consumption, which refers to an increase in food availability due to trade or innovation. Then we study how...

A growing literature within economics has sought to examine the impacts of emigration on sending countries. Some of the studies have looked within families and have investigated how emigration affects those family members who are left behind. In this paper, we explore whether older parents of...

The apparently unrelenting growth in the GDP-share of health spending (SHS) has been a perennial issue of policy concern. Does an equilibrium limit exist? The issue has been left open in recent dynamic models which take income growth and population aging as given. We view these variables as...

Lower fertility can translate into a more male-biased sex ratio if son preference is persistent and technology for sex-selection is easily accessible. This paper investigates whether financial incentives can overcome this trade-off in the context of an Indian scheme, Devirupak, that seeks to...

The world has enjoyed huge improvements in population health during the last half century. But major health problems persist, particularly in tropical countries, which are still struggling with infectious diseases while increasingly having to deal with noncommunicable diseases. Several classic...

We provide experimental evidence on the effects of vocational and entrepreneurial training for Malawian youth, in an environment where access to schooling and formal sector employment is extremely low. We track a large fraction of program drop-outs – a common phenomenon in the training...

Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), this study analyzes peer effects on obesity in a sample of 3- to 18-year-old children and adolescents in China. Even after a rich set of covariates and unobserved individual heterogeneity are controlled for, it is evident that such...

We examine the effects of different kinds of domestic abuse (physical violence, emotional abuse, sexual abuse and physical violence while the victim is pregnant) on health outcomes of children born to victims. We use data on approximately 0.6 million children born between 1975 and 2013 across...