Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs link public transfers to human capital investment in hopes of alleviating current poverty and reducing its intergenerational transmission. Whereas nearly all studies of their impacts have focused on youth, these CCT programs may also have an impact on...

Many studies document significantly positive associations between schooling attainment and wages in developing countries. But when individuals enter occupations subsequent to completing their schooling, they not only face an expected work-life path of wages, but a number of other occupational...

This study investigates the impacts of negative economic shocks on child schooling in households of rural Malawi, one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Two waves of household panel data for years 2006 and 2008 from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH)...

Worldwide children's access to after-school learning activities is highly dependent on family backgrounds. Concern over the implications of such activities for child development and educational inequality has led to a global rise of public provision of after-school learning support. However...

Recent estimates are that about 150 million children under five years of age are stunted, with significant long-run negative consequences on their schooling, cognitive skills, health and economic productivity. Understanding what determines such growth retardation, therefore, is very important....

We estimate the causal effects of air pollution exposure on low birthweight, birth-weight, and prematurity risk in South China, for all expectant mothers and by maternal age group and child sex. We do so by exploiting exogenous improvement in air quality during the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games,...

This paper investigates whether associations between birth weight and prenatal ambient environmental conditions--pollution and extreme temperatures--are mediated by 1) inequality in socioeconomic endowments measured by maternal education; 2) inequality in children's innate health endowments; and...

Adolescence has been highlighted as a period when environments are critical for the human capital development of women, and thus of their children, but evidence on this from low- and middle-income countries is scarce. We estimate the effect of mother adolescent undernutrition on offspring growth...

This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentives schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment one provides individual incentives for performance on...