Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for more than 18 million births (more than 500,000...

Twin births are often used to instrument fertility to address (negative) selection of women into fertility. However recent work shows positive selection of women into twin birth. Thus, while OLS estimates will tend to be downward biased, twin-IV estimates will tend to be upward biased. This is...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that their occurrence is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence challenging this premise. Using data on about 18 million births in 72 countries, we find that maternal...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for 17 million births in 72 countries, we...

Targeted treatments of newborns with delicate health stocks have been shown to have considerable returns in terms of survival and later life outcomes. We seek to determine to what degree such treatments are transmitted across generations. We follow three generations of linked micro-data from...