Data from a range of different environments indicate that the incidence of death is not randomly distributed across families but, rather, that there is a clustering of death amongst siblings. A natural explanation of this would be that there are (observed or unobserved) differences across...

The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s made prenatal ultrasound technology affordable and available to a large fraction of the population. As a result, ultrasound use amongst pregnant women rose dramatically in many parts of India. This paper provides evidence on the consequences...

This paper examines whether, in India, discriminatory practices by government-employed child caregivers along religious lines, lead to differential health outcomes among the care receiving children. Child caregivers participate in a novel allocation game where we incorporate treatments to...

Using a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005-14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam, we test for the impact of violent conflict on female students' enrollment rates. We find that a doubling of average killings in a district-year leads to a 13 per cent drop in girls' enrollment rate with...

Between the early 1970s and very nearly the present, Indians' per capita calorie consumption declined. This decline, perplexing in the face of rising per capita income when malnutrition is rampant, has been termed India's Calorie Consumption Puzzle. It has been partially attributed to a squeeze...

Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as the labor market. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and...

The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s led to an unprecedented increase in the availability of prenatal ultrasound technology. In this paper, we analyze the differential spread of ultrasound in India at the state level over a ten-year period (1999 to 2008) and the consequences for...

Despite the recent economic growth in many countries on the African continent, the region has seen a slow fertility transition. In this study, we explore whether the lack of structural economic change can explain this slow fertility transition. We create a unique panel data set combining...

A large share of the population of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) lacks access to modern energy services. To bridge the electricity access gap, distributed power generation systems such as minigrids and stand-alone photovoltaic systems emerge as attractive options in the power supply solution space....

Family planning is a critical issue in countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, where high fertility rates coexist with low contraceptive use alongside adverse perinatal outcomes. Using a combination of ethnographic, ecological, and folklore data, we investigate the role played in...