In this paper we study the causal effect of a large expansion of publicly provided health insurance on children's academic performance using the case of Mexico. In general, access to free health insurance could improve education outcomes directly by making household members healthier or...

I study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the formal employment of entrants from each post-Great Recession year. Using longitudinal Mexican social security records and an individual fixed-effects difference-in-differences design, I find that the pandemic caused more recent entrants from...

The 21st century has been a period of rising inequality in both income and health. In this study, we find that geographic inequality in mortality for midlife Americans increased by about 70 percent from 1992 to 2016. This was not simply because states such as New York or California benefited...

The present study represents an empirical analysis of the well-being convergence between EU Member States, using a set of 14 socio-economic indicators, grouped into 4 categories: population health status; financial situation of households; social conditions; education. To these we added the...

After a decade of rapid growth in average incomes, many countries have attained middle-income country (MIC) status. At the same time, the total number of poor people hasn’t fallen as much as one might expect and, as a result, most of the world’s poor now live in MICs. In fact, there are up...

Health is one of the largest and most complex aid sectors: 16 percent of all aid went to the health sector in 2009. While many stress the importance of aid effectiveness, there are limited quantitative analyses of the quality of health aid. In this paper, we apply Birdsall and Kharas’s Quality...

Although there have been studies of the cost-effectiveness of particular malaria interventions, there has been less analysis of broader aspects of value for money in malaria programming. In this paper, Paul Wilson and Ya’ir Aizenman examine opportunities for value for money in malaria control,...

Adolescent fertility in low- and middle-income countries presents a severe impediment to development and can lead to school dropout, lost productivity, and the intergenerational transmission of poverty. However, there is debate about whether adolescent pregnancy is a problem in and of itself or...

We evaluate the impact of a health information intervention implemented through mobile phones, using a clustered randomized control trial augmented by qualitative interviews. The intervention aimed to improve sexual health knowledge and shift individuals towards safer sexual behavior by...

Almost every country exhibits two important health financing trends: health spending per person rises and the share of out-of-pocket spending on health services declines. We describe these trends as a “health financing transition” to provide a conceptual framework for understanding health...