"The Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 is puzzling, since despite the high death rates, there is no discernable diminution in height amongst the majority of cohorts who were exposed to the famine in crucial growth years. An explanation is that shorter children experienced greater mortality and...

Background: Nutrition in utero and infancy may causally affect health and mortality at old ages. Until now, very few studies have demonstrated long-run effects on survival of early life nutrition, mainly because of data limitations and confounding issues. Methods: This paper investigates whether...

In the past century, more people have perished from famine than from the two World Wars combined. Many more were exposed to famine and survived. Yet we know almost nothing about the long run impact of famine on these survivors. This paper addresses this question by estimating the effect of...

We find that second-generation effects of in utero and early childhood malnutrition on the school participation of the offspring of mothers who experienced the China Great Leap Forward Famine. The direct impact on entrance to senior high school is also negative, but smaller in magnitude than...

The Dutch Hunger Winter (1944/45) is the most-studied famine in the literature on long-run effects of malnutrition in utero. Its temporal and spatial demarcations are clear, it was severe, it was not anticipated, and nutritional conditions in society were favorable and stable before and after...

We report evidence of long-term adverse health impacts of in utero exposure to malnutrition based on survivors in their 50s who were born during the China Famine that occurred in the years 1959-1961. We take advantage of recently available data provided by the China Health and Retirement...

At the crossroads of economics and human biology, this paper examines the extent to which pre-puberty nutritional conditions in one generation affect productivity-related outcomes in later generations. Recent studies have found a negative association between conditions at ages 8-12 and the...

This paper provides evidence of effectiveness for performance pay among government caregivers to improve child health in India. In a controlled study of 160 daycare centers serving over 4,000 children, we randomly assign individual workers to receive either fixed bonuses or incentive payments...

Numerous studies have evaluated the effect of nutrition early in life on health much later in life by comparing individuals born during a famine to others. Nutritional intake is typically unobserved and endogenous, whereas famines arguably provide exogenous variation in the provision of...

This paper investigates impacts, mechanisms and selection effects of prenatal exposure to multiple shocks, by exploiting the unique natural experiment of the Dutch Hunger Winter. At the end of World War II, a famine occurred abruptly in the Western Netherlands (November 1944 - May 1945), pushing...