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...

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:...

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...

The present paper outlines measures of disparity in healthcare access and health outcomes, drawing from the standardized metrics introduced in one related study (Bancalari et al., 2023). Beveridge countries seem to be less unequal than Bismarckian countries. Yet, there is no strong pattern in...

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...

This paper uses data from the Global School-based Student Health Survey to investigate the prevalence of health risk behaviors, in particular substance use, risky sexual behavior, and violence among adolescents in 15 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Using logit regressions and...

This paper describes the status, challenges and scope for strengthening surveillance of chronic disease risk factors, morbidities and mortality in India. We draw upon the surveillance experience of four selected States of India namely Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Kerala and Tamil Nadu to understand...

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...