We investigate the importance of subjective expectations of returns to and effort costs of the two main investments that mothers make in newborns: breastfeeding and stimulation. We find heterogeneity across mothers in expected effort costs and expected returns for outcomes in the cognitive,...

Each year more infants are infected with HIV, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and mostly due to mother-to-child, or “vertical” transmission. Advances in ART made the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV affordable in sub-Saharan Africa and other resource-constrained...

Does money matter? When investigating health behaviour, research often finds a strong positive association between income and healthy behaviour. This could however be due to individual characteristics that determine both income and health investment and is not necessarily due to the role of...

In this paper, we study the socio-economic determinants of birth weight with a focus on the mother's family status. We use Austrian birth register data covering all births between 1984 and 2007 and find that a mother's marriage is associated with a higher birth weight of the newborn in a range...

This paper investigates the role of self-productivity and home resources in capability formation from infancy to adolescence. In addition, we study the complementarities between basic cognitive, motor and noncognitive abilities and social as well as academic achievement. Our data are taken from...