A long literature in demography debates the importance of place for health. This paper assesses whether the importance of dense settlement for child mortality and child height is moderated by exposure to local sanitation behavior. Is open defecation, without a toilet or latrine, worse for infant...

Height is a marker for health, cognitive ability and economic productivity. Recent research on the determinants of height suggests that postneonatal mortality predicts height because it is a measure of the early life disease environment to which a cohort is exposed. This article advances the...

The Janani Suraksha Yojana, India's “safe motherhood program,” is a conditional cash transfer to encourage women to give birth in health facilities. Despite the program's apparent success in increasing facility-based births, quantitative evaluations have not found corresponding improvements...

Few papers in the literature provide quantitative analysis of the difficult circumstances faced by children of short-term labour migrants. This article uses new survey data from rural northwest India to study both children who migrate and those left behind. It finds that, unlike in other...

Some experimental participants are averse to compound lotteries: they prefer simple lotteries that depend on only one random event, even when the simple lotteries offer lower expected value. This paper proposes that many behavioral “investments” represent more compound risk for poorer...

Even compared with neighbouring countries, latrine use is especially uncommon in India. How might caste - historically associated with sanitation inequality - interact with government sanitation policy? Using data from Rajasthan state, we investigate the effect of caste-based reservations for...

Earlier studies have documented an “identifiable victim effect”-- people donate more to help individual people than to groups. Evidence suggests that this is in part due to an emotional reaction to the identified recipients, who generate more sympathy. However, stereotype research has shown...

Physical height is an important economic variable reflecting health and human capital. Puzzlingly, however, differences in average height across developing countries are not well explained by differences in wealth. In particular, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa...

Poor people often exhibit puzzlingly high sensitivity to low prices of important consumer health goods. This paper proposes decision costs as one explanation: whether a person buys at a price depends on whether she carefully considers the offer, which itself depends on price. A simple model...

Taller children perform better on average on tests of cognitive achievement, in part because of differences in early-life health and net nutrition. Recent research documenting this height–achievement slope has primarily focused on rich countries. Using the India Human Development Survey, a...