This paper examines how adverse shocks experienced by households, such as natural disasters, crop or job losses, or deaths, influence the acquisition of human capital of children, in the long run, and investigates whether some periods of childhood appear to be more critical in the sense that...

Reforms of primary education undertaken in Madhya Pradesh since the mid-1990’s have been said to be bringing the state close to universal enrolment, yet they have sparked much controversy and have hardly been the subject of any independent research. This paper presents the results of a field...

Using local administrative data from 1826 to 1936, we document the evolution of crime rates in 19th century France and we estimate the impact of a negative income shock on crime. Our identification strategy exploits the phylloxera crisis. Between 1863 and 1890, phylloxera destroyed about 40% of...