A consensus among social scientists is that fertility rates in Africa are declining. What determines these declines? I present fresh evidence that shows education, especially for women, is an important determinant of the fertility transition in Africa. This finding is consistent with the...

The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Progress made in the past has, to a...

This paper presents the case of World Bank support to the mass titling component of the Cambodia Land Management and Administration Project. This was a project for which there was clear national demand, as evidenced by the fact that the Cambodian government had already attempted to implement...

Notwithstanding the unprecedented attention devoted to reducing poverty and fostering human development via scaling up social sector spending, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical work on the question of whether social spending is effective in achieving these goals. This paper...

This paper analyses the health-improving effects of introducing four different constitutional social and environmental human rights (health, free education, adequate living (or welfare), and environment) and the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) into national constitution and...

I examine impacts of general budget support in 12 countries using the synthetic control approach. First, I analyse changes in government expenditures on health before and after the introduction of budget support. Second, I look at neonatal mortality (a presumed proxy for improvements in health...

Problem: Maternal and neonatal mortality remains high in low- and middle-income countries, with poor quality of intrapartum care as a barrier to further progress. Approach: We developed and tested a method of measuring the quality of maternal and neonatal care that could be embedded in a larger...

Objective: To analyse the impact of community approaches to improving newborn health and survival in low-resource countries. Methods: We updated previous meta-analyses of published cluster randomized trials of community-based interventions for neonatal survival. For each study we extracted...

Are victims of human rights abuses better off with or without economic sanctions targeted at their perpetrators? We study this question in the context of a US human rights policy, Section 1502 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. By discouraging companies from sourcing 'conflict minerals' from the...

Relative to developed countries, there are far fewer women than men in parts of the developing world. Estimates suggest that more than 200 million women are demographically 'missing' worldwide. To explain the global 'missing women' phenomenon, research has mainly focused on excess female...