Every minute, at least one woman dies from pregnancy and childbirth complications; a further 20 suffer injury, infection or disease. Despite medical advances, and years of policy declarations, this tragic situation remains particularly severe in developing countries, violating a fundamental...

This paper presents the first estimates of the causal effect of facilities for prenatal sex diagnosis on the sex ratio at birth in India. It conducts a triple difference analysis across cohort, birth order and sex of previous births. Treated births are those that occur after prenatal sex...

Worldwide, 1.6 million girls are "missing" at birth every year. One policy tool to improve the sex ratio is a conditional cash transfer that pays parents to invest in daughters, but existing evidence on their effectiveness is sparse. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we evaluate the...

Increase in health expenditure has a huge impact on the socioeconomic conditions in any country. Though, there is no consensus as to whether the rising health expenditure is beneficial or detrimental to economic growth. The present study chose India as a case study to empirically examine a...

Using the public (government) health expenditure data of sixteen states in India from 1980 to 2013, the paper examines the long-run relationship between an increase in public health expenditure and income. We use real GSDP and real per capita GSDP as proxy for income. We apply Westerlund (2007)...

Indian government launched the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY), a national health insurance scheme, in 2008 that provides cashless health services to poor households in India. We evaluate the impact of RSBY on RSBY beneficiary households' (average treatment impact on the treated)...

The primary query of this paper centres on the role played by income in determining the extent of fund allocated by Indian states for improvement of health of its population. Drawing data from the fourteen major states of India over a time span of twenty-three financial years (1974-75 to...