Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for more than 18 million births (more than 500,000...

Twin births are often used to instrument fertility to address (negative) selection of women into fertility. However recent work shows positive selection of women into twin birth. Thus, while OLS estimates will tend to be downward biased, twin-IV estimates will tend to be upward biased. This is...

In low-income settings, women are vulnerable to the psychological distress caused by the social and economic impact of large-scale shocks (e.g., pandemics, natural disasters, political). This paper evaluates a randomized over-the-phone counseling intervention aimed at mitigating the mental...

We offer a new analysis of a large-scale trial of an early-childhood education program that targeted premature, low-birthweight children. This targeting heavily oversampled twins, whose outcomes differed significantly from singletons'. Singletons' gains in short-term cognition and age-18...

We study the spillover effects of immigration enforcement policies on children's human capital. Exploiting the temporal and geographic variation in the enactment of immigration enforcement policies, we find that the English language skills of US-born children with at least one undocumented...

This paper explores the intergenerational effects of the 1997 compulsory schooling reform in Turkey, which extended compulsory schooling from five to eight years, on the developmental outcomes of children aged 36 to 59 months. We draw upon data from the 2018 Turkey Demographic and Health Survey,...

Social interaction plays an important role in early language development, and family is considered a major arena for socialization. However, little is known about the potential impact of one particular demographic group of parents, notably those parents who were themselves only children. This...

We construct and estimate a model of child development in which both the parents and children make investments in the child's skill development. In each period of the development process, partially altruistic parents act as the Stackelberg leader and the child the follower when setting her own...