We use an econometric model of fertility and children's activities to examine the causal effects of fertility on a child's activities taking the endogeneity of fertility into account. Our specification uses latent factors to allow for unobserved influences on fertility to affect a child's...

It is widely believed that expanding prenatal care should improve infant health; yet research typically finds weak effects of prenatal care on infant health. We argue that there are two kinds of pregnancies, 'complicated' and 'normal' ones, and that combining these pregnancies, as past research...

We develop a model specification and estimation framework that is applicable to many microeconometric models which fall into a treatment-outcome framework. We apply our methodology to examine the causal effect of man-aged care on the utilization of health care services. Specifically, we jointly...

We develop a semi-parametric latent class random effects multinomial logit model to distinguish between observed and unobserved household characteristics as determinants of child labor, school attendance and idleness. We find that much of the substitution between activities as a response to...

In this paper, we examine relationship between giving to family, and community institutions, within and across generations, a previously unexplored subject. We investigate the relationship between these two types of transfer networks using new data from the Indonesian Family Life Surveys (IFLS)....

A large number of land property rights reforms, including land formalization and titling projects, are taking place around the world today. The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the expected impacts of such interventions, the challenges and problems that arise in measuring and...

Individual health care expenditures have complex non-normal distributions with severe positive skewness and leptokurtosis. These features present severe challenges to reliable modeling of expenditures for prediction purposes. We compare a variety of methods using quasi-experimental techniques....

The objective of this study is to estimate the effect of parents alcohol and cigarette use on time use and educational attainment of their children. We use data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), an annual panel survey from 1995-2004. We find that both maternal and paternal...

This paper develops finite mixture models with fixed effects for two families of distributions for which the incidental parameter problem has a solution. Analytical results are provided for mixtures of Normals and mixtures of Poisson. We provide algorithms based on the expectations-maximization...