Existing estimates of the 'stock of missing women' suggest that the problem is mostly concentrated in South and East Asia, and often related to sex-selective abortions and postbirth neglect of female children. In contrast, estimates of yearly excess female deaths, referred to as the 'flow of...

Evidence from randomized controlled trials suggests that interventions relying on community involvement through a participatory learning and action (PLA) approach can improve health outcomes in resource-poor settings. However, whether PLA-based interventions remain effective after scale-up is...

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...