The first pandemic of the 21st century has brought Pyrrhic attention to one of the era's greatest megatrends - population ageing. Today rich countries are disproportionately affected but increasingly the world's elderly are residents of developing countries. In rich and poor countries alike, a...

We examine whether having a parent who smoked during one's childhood or adolescence increases the probability of being in energy poverty in adulthood. We find that people who had a parent who smoked when they were young are 0.8 to 1.4 percentage points more likely to be in energy poverty later...

In this paper we study whether the presence of binding liquidity constraints and the existence of fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children's human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut & Tran (2005) and...

Using over 50 thousand time-use diaries from two cohorts of children, we document significant gender differences in time allocation in the first 16 years in life. Relative to males, females spend more time on personal care, chores and educational activities and less time on physical and media...

This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth using a natural experiment in Switzerland. We leverage the fact that refugees arriving in Switzerland originate from places that have large shares of French (or Italian) speakers for...

Despite extensive literature on peer effects, the role of peers on personality skill development remains poorly understood. We fill this gap by investigating the effects of having disadvantaged primary school peers, generated by random classroom assignment and parental migration for employment....

Using data from two representative Demographic and Health Surveys, we examine the change in son preference over the past three decades and its effects on Pakistani women's fertility. We analyse a number of indicators and employ different empirical methods to come up with strong and persistent...

While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We ftnd negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in...

This chapter provides a narrative review of the literature relating socioeconomic circumstances early in life to mental health and well-being later in life. It starts by highlighting the various contributions focusing on associations, then moves on to the literature attempting to identify causal...

We study how income shock affect due to weather shock causally impacts the birth outcomes. We selected households depended directly on agriculture due to their extreme vulnerability to temperature and rainfall shocks. We find large efficiency loss attributed to weather shock for major food crops...