This paper examines the effects of in-utero exposure to stress on lifelong labor market outcomes. We exploit a unique natural experiment that involved randomly placed Nazi raids on municipalities in Italy during WWII. We use administrative data on the universe of private sector workers in Italy...

Economists and social scientists have debated the relative importance of nature (one's genes) and nurture (one's environment) for decades, if not centuries. This debate can now be informed by the ready availability of genetic data in a growing number of social science datasets. This paper...

While a large share of Disability Insurance recipients are expected to recover, outflow rates from temporary disability schemes are typically negligible. We estimate the disincentive effects of disability benefits on the response to a (mental) health improvement using administrative data on all...

Has massive distribution of insecticide-treated-nets contributed to the reduction in in- fant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past 15 years? Using large household surveys collected in 16 countries and exploiting the spatial correlation in distribution campaigns, we estimate the...

This study exploits the introduction of high subsidies for anti-malaria products in Senegal in 2009 to investigate if malaria prevents parents to invest in child health. Building upon the seminal paper of Dowetal. (1999), we develop a simple model of health investments under competing mortality...

Workers with fixed-term contracts typically have worse health than workers with permanent contracts. We show that these differences in health translate into a substantially higher (30%) risk of applying for disability insurance (DI) in the Netherlands. Using unique administrative data on health...

We investigate the effect of a miscarriage on mental health care use, labour market and family outcomes of women and their partners using Dutch linked administrative data. Miscarriages are common and largely random conditional on age. We estimate event study models using women with a completed...

Using linked records from the 1880 to 1940 full-count United States decennial censuses, we estimate the effects of parental exposure to compulsory schooling (CS) laws on the human capital outcomes of children, exploiting the staggered roll-out of state CS laws in the late nineteenth and early...

We analyze how HIV-knowledge influences condom use across the sexes. The empirical work is based on a household survey conducted among 1,979 households of a representative group of market persons in Lagos in 2008. Last-time-condom-use is analyzed based on a Probit model while correcting for...