Health at birth is an important indicator of human capital development over the life course. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Young Lives survey and employs instrumental variable regression models to estimate the effect of birth weight on cognitive development during childhood in...

In communities highly dependent on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods, the common occurrence of climatic shocks can lower the marginal cost of a child and raise fertility. We test this hypothesis using longitudinal data from Madagascar. Exploiting exogenous within-district year-to-year...

Can a society suffering contests between rich and poor achieve good governance in the face of endemic corruption? We examine a stylized poor state with weak institutions in which a “culture of evasion” damages state authority. Many evade tax payments, limiting the state’s economic...

In this paper, we make an attempt to understand whether low labour market returns to education in India are responsible for low female work participation. The National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) Employment Unemployment Survey (EUS) unit level data of India for the year 2011-12 is used to...

We assess, via an experiment across 207 secondary schools, how a comprehensive teacher training program affects the delivery of a major entrepreneurship curriculum reform in Rwanda. The reform introduced interactive pedagogy and a focus on business skills in the country’s required upper...

In this study, we find that the negative effect of unexploded ordnance (UXO) on the geographical density of foreign direct investment and large firms is a new channel through which the war legacy impedes local development in Vietnam. A 1% increase in the proportion of UXO-contaminated area leads...

We empirically examine whether violation of hypergamy - which occurs when the wife's economic status equals or exceeds that of her husband's - causally affects domestic violence using microdata from India. Identifying the causal effect of hypergamy violation on domestic violence, however, is...

The persistently high employment share of the informal sector makes entrepreneurship a necessity for youth in many developing countries. We exploit exogenous variation in the implementation of Rwanda's entrepreneurship education reform in secondary schools to evaluate its effect on student...

We investigate how fertility and demographic factors affect migration at the household level by assessing the causal effects of sibship size and structure on offspring's international migration. We use a rich demographic survey on the population of Mexico and exploit presumably exogenous...

This paper studies to what extent banning first-generation women from aborting affected the fertility of second-generation individuals who did not face such legal constraint. Using multiple censuses from Romania, I follow men and women born around the 1966 Romanian abortion ban to study the...