This paper estimates the survival time of nearly 7,000 firms in a dozen high-income and middle-income countries in a scenario of extreme economic distress, using the World Bank's Enterprises Surveys. Under the assumption that firms have no incoming revenues and cover only fixed costs, the median...

In parts of Asia, South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, result in the excess mortality of girls, and skew child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, 1.8 million girls under the age of five go "missing" because of the...

The introduction of prenatal sex-detection technologies in India has led to a phenomenal increase in abortion of female fetuses. This paper examines the impacts of this on girl relative to boy mortality rates after birth, using data from 1973-2005. The analysis finds a narrowing of the gender...

This study exploits a natural experiment to investigate the impact of land reform on the fertility outcomes of households in rural Ethiopia. Public policies and customs created a situation where Ethiopian households could influence their usufruct rights to land via a demographic expansion of the...

The Russian Federation's population has been declining since 1992, but recently the decline appears to be over. Although fertility has risen since the 2007 introduction of the family policy package, which focused on stimulating second and higher-order births, total fertility rates still remain...

Sex ratios at birth rose sharply in the South Caucasus countries after 1991, but recent data indicate that this trend is turning. What caused this rise, and what can be done to accelerate its normalization? Traditional kinship systems in the region are similar to those of other settings with...

Previous research on sex-selective abortions has ignored the interactions between fertility, birth spacing, and sex selection, despite both fertility and birth spacing being important considerations for parents when deciding on the use of sex selection. This paper presents a novel approach that...

Despite its volatile history, the Islamic Republic of Iran has performed well on social indicators, especially in providing basic services such as health care and education. Iran's fertility decline may have proceeded in two stages, the first beginning in the late 1960s. The Iranian government...

This note examines the influence of household decision making on women's uptake of reproductive health services, using data from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM). In households where women have greater decision?making power, the note finds a significant and...

The paper revisits the traditional transport-agricultural growth nexus. Connectivity is particularly challenging for small island developing states, such as the Comoros, where domestic markets are limited and transport and transaction costs tend to be high. Using household survey data from...