In this paper we examine the effect of dollar stores on children's Body Mass Index (BMI). We use a dataset compiled by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement that reflects a BMI screening program for public school children in the state of Arkansas. We combine propensity score matching with...

This study examines the relationship between maternal behavior during pregnancy, birth outcomes, and early childhood development. Specifically, in the context of four measures of maternal behavior during pregnancy (maternal smoking, drinking, prenatal care, and maternal weight gain), three...

The paper investigates birth weight and its correlates in Kenya using nationally representative data collected by the government in the early 1990s. I find that immunization of the mother against tetanus during pregnancy is strongly associated with improvements in birth weight. Other factors...

Many empirical studies specify outcomes as a linear function of endogenous regressors when conducting instrumental variable (IV) estimation. We show that tests for treatment effects, selection bias, and treatment effect heterogeneity are biased if the true relationship is non-linear. These...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

This paper formulates and estimates multistage production functions for children's cognitive and noncognitive skills. Skills are determined by parental environments and investments at different stages of childhood. We estimate the elasticity of substitution between investments in one period and...

We contribute to the literature on the determinants of socioeconomic health disparities by studying how the health behavior of adolescents may arise from the degree of communication between parent and child. Parent-child communication may function as a mediator between family background and...

We estimate the impact of changes in unearned income on the height and weight of young children in a developing country. As source of variation we use changes in the eligibility criteria for receipt of an unconditional cash transfer in Ecuador. Two years after families lost the transfer, which...

This paper investigates the degree of intergenerational transmission of education for individuals from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. Rather than identifying the causal effect of parental education via instrumental variables we exploit the feature of the transmission mechanism...