Fertility rates have declined dramatically across almost all highincome countries over the past decades. This has raised concerns about future economic prospects. Indeed, fully- and semi-endogenous growth models imply that a shrinking workforce would lead to declining income growth and perhaps...

Smallholder farming dominates agriculture in poorer countries. Yet, traditional recall-based surveys on smallholder farming in these countries face challenges with seasonal variations, high survey costs, poor record-keeping, and technical capacity constraints resulting in significant recall...

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...

The aim of this research is to build on a theory for explaining economic development in a (neoclassical) growth model with endogenous fertility. The economy is comprised of overlapping generations of rational and identical individuals and identical competitive firms producing with a...

A central policy issue in the battle against HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is whether and when high-prevalence countries might become fully autonomous in designing and implementing their own intervention policies aimed to control the disease. The aim of this research is twofold. First, it...

The problem of land inequality has attracted renewed interest in the development literature due to its potential effects on the welfare of smallholder farmers. Poverty reduction is an important sustainable development goal and a clearer understanding of the factors that could lead to poverty is...

This paper combines pre-pandemic face-to-face survey data with follow up phone surveys collected in April-May 2020 to quantify the overall and differential impacts of COVID-19 on household food security, labor market participation and local food prices in Nigeria. We exploit spatial variation in...

Nigeria has experienced bouts of violent conflict in different regions over the last few decades leading to significant loss of life. In this paper, we explore the potential short and accumulated long term effects of such conflict on labor supply of agricultural households. Using a nationally...

There is a clear and persistent inequality of bureaucratic employment between individuals with a bureaucrat parent and those without. Using the recent anti-corruption campaign in China as a quasi-experiment, we investigate how endeavors for counter-corruption affect inequality and potential...