We provide some of the first empirical evidence of maternal and fetal health effects of working during pregnancy by using a unique dataset from the New Jersey Department of Health that includes information not only on pregnancy and birth outcomes but also on maternal employment. We match the...

We study whether childhood health capital affects school attendance, long-run occupational outcomes, and intergenerational mobility. We address this question in the context of London, England during the late-nineteenth century using the inpatient admission records of three large hospitals linked...

We use temperature variation within narrowly-defined geographic and demographic cells to show that exposure to extreme heat increases the risk of maternal hospitalization during pregnancy for potentially life-threatening causes. We find that this effect is driven by women residing in...

We use data from the 11 waves of the U.S. Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development 1991-2005, following children from ages 6 months through 15 years. Observers rated videos of them, obtaining measures of looks at each age. Given their family income, parents' education, race/ethnicity and...

Hoynes, Miller and Simon (2015), henceforth HMS, report that the national expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is associated with decreases in low birth weight. We question their findings. HMS's difference-in-differences estimates are unidentified in some comparisons, while failed...

In the past 40 years, a large number of children have been abandoned by their families or have been abducted in China. We argue that the implementation of the one-child policy has significantly increased both child abandonment and child abduction and that, furthermore, the cultural preference...

We study the importance of maternal subjective beliefs about the technology of skill formation in determining parental investments on child development. We describe our framework in three steps. First, we discuss the construction of the survey instrument we used to elicit maternal subjective...

We assess evidence from randomized control trials (RCTs) on long-run economic productivity and living standards in poor countries. We first document that several studies estimate large positive long-run impacts, but that relatively few existing RCTs have been evaluated over the long-run. We next...

Low birth weight infants born to mothers with low educational attainment have a double hurdle to overcome in the production of human capital. We examine whether income transfers in the form of Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments for children with disabilities can help close the gap in...

This paper evaluates the effects of the implementation of a structured early stimulation curriculum combined with a nutritional intervention through public large-scale parenting support services for vulnerable families in rural Colombia, known as FAMI, using a clustered randomized controlled...