The prevalence of low birth weight is an important aspect of public health which has been linked to increased risk of infant death, increased cost of care, and a range of later life outcomes. Using data from a new Irish cohort study, I document the relationship between birth weight and...

A growing literature suggests that stressful events in pregnancy can have negative effects on birth outcomes. Some of the estimates in this literature may be affected by small samples, omitted variables, endogenous mobility in response to disasters, and errors in the measurement of gestation, as...

In this paper we discuss the prioritisation of healthcare projects where there is a concern about health inequalities, but the decision maker is reluctant to make explicit quantitative value judgements and the data systems only allow the measurement of health at an aggregate level. Our analysis...

We estimate the harm from smoking during pregnancy upon child birth outcomes, using a rich dataset on a cohort of mothers and their births. We exploit a fixed effects approach to disentangle the correlation between smoking and birth weight from the causal effect. We find that, despite a detailed...

El objetivo principal del primer estudio, “El rol de las percepciones y los conocimientos de las madres en el estado nutricional de sus niños”, de Alcázar, Marini y Walker, es analizar los factores determinantes de la desnutrición infantil (talla para la edad de los niños menores de 2...

This paper analyzes Thailand's 2001 healthcare reform, "30 Baht." The program increased funding available to hospitals to care for the poor and reduced copays to 30 Baht (~$0.75). Our estimates suggest the supply-side funding of the program increased healthcare utilization, especially among the...

The high and rapidly increasing prevalence of mental illnesses underscores the importance of understanding their causal origins. This paper analyzes one factor at a critical stage of human development: exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures during the fetal period. We find that in...

Este trabajo aplica al caso peruano el marco conceptual de igualdad de oportunidades y otros indicadores para medir de manera directa cómo se distribuyen las oportunidades de acceso a bienes y servicios clave entre los niños. El objetivo subyacente de la investigación es poner en el debate...

The demographic transition is perhaps the most important event to occur in human affairs during the last 250 years, since the time of the enlightenment. It started in the countries of north-western Europe, and it has gone on to affect the rest of the world (Dyson 2009). Signified by the...

We show that children who are born at the weekend or just before are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children’s development for a sample of uncomplicated births from...