This paper provides empirical evidence on the role of public health insurance in mitigating adverse outcomes associated with health shocks. Exploiting the rollout of a universal health insurance program in rural China, I find that total household income and consumption are fully insured against...

The human costs of famines outlast the famines themselves. An increasing body of research points to their adverse long-run consequences for those born or in utero during them. This paper offers an introduction to the burgeoning literature on fetal origins and famine through a review of research...

The impact of group-based credit programs on the nutritional status of children by gender in rural Bangladesh is evaluated. Lacking exclusion restrictions of the usual sort, the effect of credit program participation by gender of participant is identified by imposing a factor structure on the...

This paper provides evidence of effectiveness for performance pay among government caregivers to improve child health in India. In a controlled study of 160 daycare centers serving over 4,000 children, we randomly assign individual workers to receive either fixed bonuses or incentive payments...

We examine whether China's remarkable reduction in income poverty has been accompanied by comparable progress in health. Our findings are fourfold: (a) province-level rates of improvement in life expectancy were higher in the 1990s than in the 1970s and the 1980s, and were lowest in the 1980s....

Empirical studies from developed countries observe that women report worse health and higher healthcare utilization than men, but the health disadvantage diminishes with age; gender differences in self-rated health often vanish or are reversed in older ages. Comparable assessments of health...

This paper examines the relationship between access to drinking water, sanitation facilities, and health outcomes for children in India. We use the NFHS 2005-2006 household-level survey data to construct the nutritional distribution for two anthropometric health measures for children between...

This paper provides evidence of effectiveness for performance pay among government caregivers to improve child health in India. In a controlled study of 160 daycare centers serving over 4,000 children, we randomly assign individual workers to receive either fixed bonuses or incentive payments...

In this paper, the growth effect of health in Ghana is examined for the period 1982–2012. Life expectancy at birth is used as proxy for health, and real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) for economic growth. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test approach to cointegration...