Does the sex composition of existing children in a family affect fertility behavior? An unusually large data set, covering 64 countries and some 5 million births, is used to show that fertility behavior responds to the presence--or absence--of sons in many regions of the developing world. The...

The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. This article analyzes the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. It finds an increase of about 2.5 percentage points in the infant mortality rate for children born during the crisis of the...

Industry affiliation provides an important channel through which trade liberalization can affect worker earnings and wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers. This empirical study of the impact of the 1988--94 trade liberalization in Brazil on the industry wage structure suggests...