This paper analyzes gender differences in jobs while in high school. The availability of school class based samples with detailed information on teenage jobs allows for a comparison of the behavior of boys and girls who are in the same school class, and thus have virtually identical education...

Reducing the gender gap in education is a primary goal for many countries. Two major challenges for many girls are the distance to school and their safety when commuting to school. In Zambia, we studied the impact of providing a bicycle to a school-going girl who lives more than 3 km from the...

Eating disorders are an important and growing health concern, and bulimia nervosa (BN) accounts for the largest fraction of eating disorders. Health consequences of BN are substantial and especially serious given the increasingly compulsive nature of the disorder. However, remarkably little is...

In this paper we explore a serious eating disorder, bulimia nervosa (BN), which afflicts a surprising number of girls in the US. We challenge the long-held belief that BN primarily affects high income White teenagers, using a unique data set on adolescent females evaluated regarding their...

Large differences in fertility between women with high and low levels of education suggest that schooling may have a direct impact on knowledge and use of contraception. We investigate this issue using information on women in Mexico. In order to identify the causal effect of schooling, we...

Indian girls have significantly lower school enrollment rates than boys. Anecdotal evidence suggests that gender-differential treatment is the main explanation, but empirical support is often weak. I analyze school enrollment using rainfall shocks, a plausibly exogenous source of income...

Son preference in countries like India results in higher female infant mortality rates and differentially lower access to health care and education for girls than for boys. We use a nationally representative survey of Indian households (NFHS-3) to conduct the first study that analyzes whether...

Illegal trafficking of women is a result of their disadvantageous position in the society that is often reflected in increasing preference for son and neglect for daughters. Multiple reports point to India as country confronted with both higher levels of illegal trafficking of girls and abnormal...

We study the impact of an innovative program in the Indian state of Bihar that aimed to reduce the gender gap in secondary school enrollment by providing girls who continued to secondary school with a bicycle that would improve access to school. Using data from a large representative household...

We assess the impact of large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of students. The gradual rollout of the program across geographic regions provides identifying variation in the policy. The program increased access to...