Using primary household data from India we estimate family utility function parameters that measure the relative importance of consumption, schooling of children and health (both physical and mental) and find that mental health is far more important than consumption or children’s schooling in...

This paper estimates the effect of conflict and conflict-related vulnerability factors, namely sexual violence and economic vulnerability, on HIV prevalence rates. We find that HIV prevalence rates are higher in conflict-affected regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) than in...

For decades, the academic literature has focused on three survey measures of expected inflation: the Livingston Survey, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, and the Michigan Survey. While these measures have been useful in developing models of forecasting inflation, the data are low frequency...

This paper examines the hypothesis that contraceptive use of illiterate women having literate partners (proximate literates), may be higher than that of illiterate women whose partners too are illiterates (isolate illiterates) using Demographic Health Survey data for India (2005-2006). Results...

Literature on family planning considers natural (also called traditional) contraceptives to be ‘ineffective’ because its users are not motivated to control their fertility. While this is true for initial stages of fertility transition, studies have reported that it is women belonging to...

Nearly nine million children under five years of age die annually. Diarrhea is considered to be the second leading cause of Under-5 mortality in developing countries. About one out of five deaths are caused by diarrhea. In this paper, we use the newly available data set DLHS-3 to quantify the...

In this paper we examine the effect of dollar stores on children's Body Mass Index (BMI). We use a dataset compiled by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement which created and implemented the BMI screening process for all public school children in the state of Arkansas. We combine propensity...

In this paper we examine the effect of dollar stores on children's Body Mass Index (BMI). We use data from a dataset compiled by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement which created and implemented the BMI screening process for all public school children in the state of Arkansas. We combine...

In this article we attempt to identify the impact of social effects on the decision to practice excision on girls, based on the methodology used by Bertrand, Luttmer and Mallainathan (2000). We are particularly interested in social determinants, and make use of the heterogeneity of behaviors...

This article summarizes some propositions regarding economic dynamics and implications of two-way altruism, on the basis of the human-capital-based OLG model of Ehrlich and Lui (1991) and Ehrlich and Kim (2007) with application of a modified, fertility-endogenized definition of linearly...