The authors examine how domestic violence may be used as a bargaining instrument, to extract larger dowries from a spouse's family. The phrase"dowry violence"refers not to the paid at the time of the wedding, but to additional payments demanded by the groom's family after the marriage. The...

The author investigates the extent and determinants of poor child health and nutrition in rural Guatemala, as reflected in attained height. Exploiting a rich data set on relevant social, economic, ethnic, and geographic characteristics, he estimates the role played by exogeneous individual,...

Kinship systems in China, the Republic of Korea, and North India have similar features that generate discrimination against girls, and these countries have some of the highest proportions of girls"missing"in the world. The authors document how the excess mortality of girls was increased by war,...

Son preference has persisted in the face of sweeping economic and social changes in China, India, and the Republic of Korea. The authors attribute this to their similar family systems, which generate strong disincentives to raise daughters while valuing adult women's contributions to the...

Most existing estimates of the macroeconomic costs of AIDS, as measured by the reduction in thegrowth rate of gross domestic product, are modest. For Africa-the continent where the epidemic has hit the hardest-they range between 0.3 and 1.5 percent annually. The reason is that these estimates...

The author tests the hypothesis that education improves health and increases people's life expectancy. Smoking histories-reconstructed from retrospective data in the National Health Interview Surveys in the United States-show that after 1950, when information about the dangers associated with...

Over the past three decades, China has made commendable strides in improving the health status of its population. Between 1965 and 1995, its infant mortality rate declined from 90 per 1,000 live births to 36. During the same period, life expectancy at birth rose from 55 to 69 years and the...

The authors describe trends in single parenthood in Russia, examining factors that affect living arrangements in single-mother families. Before economic reform, single mothers and their children were somewhat protected form poverty by government assistance (income support, subsidized child care,...

Pension systems may have a different impact on gender because women are less likely than men to work in formal labor markets and earn lower wages when they do. Recent multipillar pension reforms tighten the link between payroll contributions and benefits, leading critics to argue that they will...

Standard methods of measuring poverty assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...