This paper examines the impact of outdoor pollution and parental smoking on children's health from birth until the age of three years in Germany. We use representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), combined with five air pollution levels. These data were provided by the...

This paper investigates the leave-out strategy of instruments by using the leave-out community ratio of household access to in-yard water sources and community water infrastructure as instruments for hours in fetching water time, and the data on disease symptoms. The results show that...

Despite progress in air pollution control, concerns remain over the health impact of poor air quality. Governments increasingly issue air quality information to enable vulnerable groups to avoid exposure. Avoidance behaviour potentially biases estimates of the health effects of air pollutants....

This paper examines the health effects of Caesarean section (CS) for children and their mothers. We use exogenous variation in the probability of CS in a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. Using administrative Danish data, we exploit an information shock for obstetricians that sharply...

Evaluating Accountable Care Organizations is difficult because there is a great deal of heterogeneity in terms of their reimbursement incentives and other programmatic features. We examine how variation in reimbursement incentives and administration among two Medicaid managed care plans impacts...

The paper estimates the effect of SO2 pollution on infant mortality in Germany, 1985–2003. To avoid endogeneity problems, I exploit the natural experiment created by the mandated desulfurization at power plants and power plants’ location and prevailing wind directions, which together...

This study examines the impact of early life malaria exposure on cognition in sample of Mexican adults, using the nationwide introduction of malaria eradication efforts to identify causal impacts. The core findings are that birth year exposure to malaria eradication was associated with increases...

A growing literature suggests that stressful events in pregnancy can have negative effects on birth outcomes. Some of the estimates in this literature may be affected by small samples, omitted variables, endogenous mobility in response to disasters, and errors in the measurement of gestation, as...

Scheduling births for non-medical reasons has become an increasingly common practice in the United States and around the world. We exploit a natural experiment created by child tax benefits, which rewards births that occur just before the new year, to better understand the full costs of elective...

We use household survey data and a unique census of institutionalized children to analyze the impact of abortion legalization in Romania. We exploit the lift of the abortion ban in December 1989, when communist dictator Ceausescu and his regime were removed from power, to understand its impact...