Controversy exists over whether the estimated effects of schooling on health care use reflect the influence of unobserved factors. Existing estimates may overstate the schooling effect because of the failure to control for unobserved variables or may be downwardly biased due to measurement...

Early life health and net nutrition shape childhood and adult cognitive skills and human capital. In poor countries -- and especially in South Asia -- widespread open defecation without making use of a toilet or latrine is an important source of childhood disease. This paper studies the effects...

Recent evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer programs for schooling are effective in raising school enrollment and attendance. However, there is also reason to believe that such programs can affect other outcomes, such as the sexual behavior of their young beneficiaries. Zomba Cash...

This paper finds large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that...

This paper investigates the effects of intermittent screening and treatment of malaria on the health and education of school children in an area of low-to-moderate malaria transmission. A cluster randomized trial was implemented with 5,233 children in 101 government primary schools on the south...

This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate social projects from the perspective of children's opportunities on the basis of the effects of these projects on the distribution of outcomes. The evaluation is conditioned on characteristics for which individuals are not responsible; in this case,...

Even a modestly effective HIV-1 vaccine would be highly useful in India and could avoid millions of deaths. How should such a vaccine be introduced? Based on evidence of adoption of other vaccines in India, current levels of spending on them and coverage of prevention programs targeting both...

This paper reviews the effectiveness and efficiency of key policy instruments for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). Based on a simple cross-country regression analysis, the paper argues that average Millennium Development Goal progress is likely to be too slow to meet...

During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. This paper investigates whether...

This paper analyzes the level and trends in inequality of opportunity among Egyptian children during the 2000s. The analysis uses severall tools, including comparison of the distributions of early risks and outcomes across circumstance groups; estimation of the human opportunity index;...