This paper evaluates the short- and medium-term health impacts of offering families with children under 5 universal access to centres providing childcare, health services, parenting support and parental job assistance. Increased access to these centres during early childhood increases the...

Early Childhood Interventions (ECI) offering disadvantaged children preschool and family support services in the US show long-lasting health impacts. Can these benefits hold when these programs are offered to all children in contexts with universal healthcare? We evaluate the short- and...

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development in the first five years of life,...

Health constitutes a fundamental aspect of our well-being. It is also a key factor in determining our contribution to market and non-market output. Health inequality refers to the unequal realization of health outcomes between different groups in the population. Systematic disparities in health...

There is widespread and unexplained variation in the outcomes of similar patients across place and providers in all developed health systems. This paper provides new evidence on the role senior doctors play in determining patient outcomes. I exploit within-hospital quasi-random assignment of...

Until a vaccine is widely available, face masks and other nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) will continue to be the frontline defense against Covid-19 in developing countries. But their effectiveness depends critically on compliance by young adults, who are most likely both to become...

This paper examines why a larger share of COVID-19 deaths occurs among young and middle-aged adults in developing countries than in high-income countries. Using novel data at the country, city, and patient levels, we investigate the drivers of this gap in terms of the key components of the...

The current coronavirus pandemic is an unprecedented public health challenge that has devastating economic impacts for households. Using a sample of 230,540 respondents to online surveys in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, we show that the economic impacts are large and unequal:...

This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study using information collected through a survey conducted in peri-urban areas of Metropolitan Lima between October and November 2021. The survey was applied to households residing close to and on both sides of the geographic boundary of...

This paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study using information collected through a survey conducted in peri-urban areas of Metropolitan Lima between October and November 2021. The survey was applied to households residing close to and on both sides of the geographic boundary of...