This article investigates the impact of piped water supply and sanitation on health outcomes in urban Yemen using a combination of quasi-experimental methods and results from microbiological water tests. Variations in project roll-out allow separate identification of water and sanitation...

Institutions are a major factor explaining development outcomes. This study focuses on social institutions related to gender inequality understood as long-lasting norms, values and codes of conduct that shape gender roles, and presents evidence on why they matter for development. We derive...

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...

Comparing DHS data from 235 regions in 29 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, we find that the combination of low levels of malnutrition together with dramatically high rates of mortality, encountered in Kenya's Lake Victoria territory, is unique for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the causes...

Since the publication of the new multi-country reference standard by WHO it is likely that future progress in the fight against undernutrition will be tracked by using this new standard. The use of the new reference standard will result in clear changes in the prevalence and composition of...

In this paper we analyze if an `urban mortality penalty\' exists for today\'s developing countries, repeating the history of industrialized nations during the 19th century. We analyze the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) of 19 Sub-Saharan African countries for differences in child and adult...

Using variation across geographical regions, a number of studies from the U.S. and other developed countries have found more deaths in economic upturns and less deaths in economic downturns. We use data from regions in Norway for 1977-2008 and find the same procyclical patterns. Using...

Historically, official Norwegian mortality projections computed by Statistics Norway have consistently under-predicted life expectancy. The projected age distribution of deaths may be used to check if the official mortality projections are plausible. The aim of the paper is to verify whether the...

Procedural failures of physicians or teams in interventional healthcare may positively or negatively predict subsequent patient outcomes. We identify this effect by applying (non-)linear dynamic panel methods to data from the Belgian Transcatheter Aorta Valve Implantation (TAVI) registry...

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...