Economic shocks at birth have lasting effects on children's health several years after the shock. The authors calculate height for age z-scores for children under age five using data from a Rwandan nationally representative household survey conducted in 1992. They exploit district and time...

This paper analyzes complementarities between different Millennium Development Goals, focusing on child mortality and how it is influenced by progress in the other goals, in particular two goals related to the expansion of female education: universal primary education and gender equality in...

Data from three rounds of nationally representative health surveys in India are used to assess the impact of selective mortality on children’s anthropometrics. The nutritional status of the child population was simulated under the counterfactual scenario that all children who died in the first...

Although reproductive health advocates consider family planning programs the intervention of choice to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of skepticism among economists as to their effectiveness, despite little rigorous evidence to support either position. This study explores the...

This paper studies the effect of increased access to antiretroviral therapy on risky sexual behavior, using data collected in Mozambique in 2007 and 2008. The survey sampled both households of randomly selected HIV positive individuals and households from the general population. Controlling for...

Strong boy-bias and its consequences for young and unborn girls have been widely documented for Asia. This paper considers a country in Sub-Saharan Africa and finds that parental gender preferences do affect fertility behavior and shape traditional social institutions with negative effects on...

Argentina's Plan Nacer provides insurance for maternal and child health care to uninsured families. The program allocates funding to provinces based on enrollment of beneficiaries and adds performance incentives based on indicators of the use and quality of maternal and child health care...

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...

This paper examines whether the son preference and fertility behavior of Muslim couples respond to the risk of inheritance expropriation by their extended family. According to traditional Islamic inheritance principles, only the son of a deceased man can exclude his male agnates from inheritance...

HIV-prevention strategies have yielded only limited success so far in slowing down the AIDS epidemic. This paper examines novel intervention strategies that use incentives to discourage risky sexual behaviors. Widely-adopted conditional cash transfer programs that offer payments conditioning on...