We measure and examine data error in health, education and income statistics used to construct the Human Development Index. We identify three sources of data error which are due to (i) data updating, (ii) formula revisions and (iii) thresholds to classify a country's development status. We...

We document the impact of the AIDS crisis on non-AIDS related health services in fourteen sub-Saharan African countries. Using multiple waves of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for each country, we examine antenatal care, birth deliveries, and rates of immunization for children born between...

SHARE, the "Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe", is a large population-based panel survey among people aged 50 and over with data from 28 European countries and Israel. It investigates individual, economic, health-related, and social life-course circumstances in order to shed...

Missed clinic appointments present a significant burden to health care through disruption of care, inefficient use of staff time and wasted clinical resources. Short message service (SMS) appointment reminders show promise to improve clinics' management through timely appointment cancellations...

The health care system commonly relies on information about family medical history in the allocation of screenings and in diagnostic processes. At the same time, an emerging literature documents that treatment for "marginally diagnosed" patients often has minimal impacts. This paper shows that...

Does Canada's publicly funded, single payer health care system deliver better health outcomes and distribute health resources more equitably than the multi-payer heavily private U.S. system? We show that the efficacy of health care systems cannot be usefully evaluated by comparisons of infant...

In 2007, approximately one in five children in Zambia lived with an HIV positive adult. We identify the effect of adult antiretroviral therapy (ART) availability at scale on children's educational outcomes by combining data on the expansion of ART availability with two national household surveys...

The adoption of new clinical practice patterns by medical care providers is often challenging, even when they are believed to be both efficacious and profitable. This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine the effects of temporary financial incentives paid to medical care clinics...

We nested a large-scale field experiment into the national rollout of the introduction of performance pay for medical care providers in Rwanda to study the effect of incentives for health care providers. In order to identify the effect of incentives separately from higher compensation, we held...