Open defecation is exceptionally widespread in India, a country which also suffers some of the world's worst rates of child stunting. We study a randomized controlled trial of a village-level sanitation program, implemented in one district by the government of Maharashtra. We find that the...

Physical height is an important economic variable re ecting health and human capital. Puzzlingly, however, differences in average height across developing countries are not well explained by differences in wealth. In particular, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa...

This paper examines how child maltreatment is affected by the economic circumstances of parents. “Child maltreatment” encompasses a wide range of behaviors that adversely affect children. It includes neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and other forms of abuse or neglect. Using...

Women have worse self-rated health and more hospitalization episodes than men from early adolescence to late middle age, but are less likely to die at each age. We use 14 years of data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey to examine this paradox. Our results indicate that the...

The end of apartheid in South Africa brought with it the need to reform one component of the system of social assistance for poorer people – that dealing with support to women and children. Under the old regime, a State Maintenance Grant had been awarded by government to help mothers without...

We estimate the impact of family structure on investments made in children’s health, using data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey Child Health Supplement. Controlling for household size, income and characteristics, we find that children living with step mothers are significantly...

Mean heights are often used to measure living standards for times and places in which other economic indicators are not available. We propose a novel approach to modeling the distribution of heights, which does not rely on common but often-unwarranted assumptions such as normality. We construct...

Self-reported health status (SRHS) is an imperfect measure of non-fatal health, but allows examination of how health status varies over the life course. Although women have lower mortality than men, they report worse health status up to age 65. The SRHS of both men and women deteriorates with...

People in poor countries live shorter lives than people in rich countries so that, if we scale income by some index of health, there is more inequality in the world than if we consider income alone. Such international inequalities in life expectancy decreased for many years after 1945, and the...

What are the determinants of the health and of well-being? Income and wealth are clearly part of the story, but does access to health-care have a large independent effect, as the advocates of more investment in health-care, such as the World Health Organization’s Commission on Macroeconomics...