Maternal and newborn health in rural America suffers from a lack of obstetrical care, which is currently at crisis levels. Many state-level public policies have exacerbated or even initiated barriers to quality and access in rural healthcare. Such policies include certificate-of-need (CON) laws,...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) enacted March 23, 2010, requires that group health plans and insurers make dependent coverage available for children until they attain the age of 26, regardless of tax or student status, or dependent status as it relates to financial...

The treatment of drinking water is advocated to reduce the incidence of child diarrhea. However, evaluating the impact of water treatment with only observational data leads to biased estimates since it could be the occurrence of child diarrhea that induced the household to treat their drinking...

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: First, many previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. In contrast, the experience of California in the 1990s is clearly relevant to...

Child care subsidies play a critical role in facilitating the transition of disadvantaged mothers from welfare to work. However, little is known about the influence of these policies on children's health and well-being. In this paper, we study the impact of subsidy receipt on low-income...

This paper exploits a unique opportunity to evaluate the impact of the quality change in the labor and delivery services on maternal and infant health. Since basic medical care has been universally available in Ukraine, implementation of the Mother and Infant Health Project allows addressing...

This paper examines the determinants of the health of children ages 6 to 19, as reported in the Child Development Supplements (CDS) to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The primary focus is on the effect of religion on the reported overall health and psychological health of the child....

We identify the ages that constitute critical periods in children's development towards their adult health status. For this we use data on families migrating into Sweden from countries that are mostly poorer, with less healthy conditions. Long-run health is proxied by adult height. The relation...

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure...

This study was prepared by Sven Neelsen while he was working with the ifo Institute for Economic Research. It was completed in December 2011 and accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich in May 2012. The study investigates long-run effects of...