An estimated 94,000 children in Louisiana have a parent who is behind bars, with devastating effects on children and families. The entire family serves this sentence. Parental incarceration is a growing epidemic. Nationally, one in 28 children experiences parental incarceration today, compared...

Worldwide 10-20% of children and adolescents experience mental disorders. Mental disorders, if remain untreated, can impose enormous and lifelong burden to the individual, family and society. Yet, a large proportion of affected children do not receive treatment owing to poor accessibility to...

Childhood experiences during the early years set a critical foundation for the entire life course, as these shape early child development which in turn strongly influence one’s health throughout life. Child maltreatment includes all forms of physical and/or emotional ill-treatment, sexual...

While the long-term consequences of unmet child mental health needs are well-documented, out-of-pocket costs remain an important barrier to accessing medication in childhood and adolescence. This paper exploits the implementation of a public drug insurance program in Québec, Canada, to estimate...

In this paper, we investigate whether in-utero exposure to municipal-level COVID-19 incidence rates in Brazil was associated with lower infant birth weight. To lower endogeneity related to conception during COVID-19, we include infants who were conceived before and born after, the first official...

Many developed countries have recently experienced sharp increases in home birth rates. This paper investigates the impact of home births on the health of low-risk newborns using data from the Netherlands, the only developed country where home births are widespread. To account for endogeneity in...

Ample empirical evidence links adverse conditions during early childhood (the period from conception to age five) to worse health outcomes and lower academic achievement in adulthood. Can early-life medical care and public health interventions ameliorate these effects? Recent research suggests...

We investigate the spillover effects of early-life medical treatments on the siblings of treated children. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits changes in medical treatments across the very low birth weight (VLBW) cutoff. Using administrative data from Denmark, we first confirm...

Evidence suggests that hospital mergers can reduce costs but less is known about their effects on patient outcomes. We study how a wave of mergers that led to the shutdown of one third of all Swedish maternity wards affected the health of mothers who gave birth and their newborns. Applying a...