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 that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A crucial prerequisite for the success of development interventions is their uptake in the targeted population. We use the setup of an intervention conducted in Indonesia and Pakistan to investigate dis-/incentivizing factors for program's uptake and support. Making use of a framework grounded...

We propose an innovative child-specific measure of son preference. It allows to explicitly address birth order and sex composition effects. We first establish that, when using this child-specific measure, son preference is more common among later born children and in families with fewer sons. We...

Lack of information about health risks may limit adoption of improved nutritional and healthy behavior. This paper studies the effect of nutrition information intervention on household dietary behavior, child health, and cognitive ability of children in rural India. Using experimental data and...

We present experimental evidence on the impact of delivering double-fortified salt (DFS), salt fortified with iron and iodine, through the Indian school-feeding program called “mid-day meal” on anemia, cognition, and math and reading outcomes of primary school children. We conducted a field...

The existing literature on "missing women" has suggested that the problem is mostly concentrated in India and China, and mostly related to sex-selective abortions and post-birth neglect of female children. In a recent paper in the Review of Economic Studies, Anderson and Ray (AR) develop a new...