What are the links between climate change, epidemics and socioeconomic inequality? While recent epidemics have focused attention on the effects of epidemics on economic outcomes, and a separate literature in climate science and environmental health has linked global environmental change to...

The immediate physical damages caused by environmental disasters are conspicuous and often the focus of media and government attention. In contrast, the nature and magnitude of post-disaster losses remain largely unknown because they are not easily observable. Here we exploit annual variation in...

This study examines the effect of life expectancy on fertility, education and labor force participation. Using birth and sibling histories from the Demographic Health Surveys conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, I construct time series of age-specific birth rates and mortality rates at the...

Successful economic development is usually characterized by two salient phenomena: industrialization and demographic transition. Chronologically both events happen so closely to each other that historians and economists alike suspect that they are interrelated. This paper develops a theory for...

This paper builds a world atlas of child penalties in employment based on micro data from 134 countries. The estimation of child penalties is based on pseudo-event studies of first child birth using cross-sectional data. The pseudo-event studies are validated against true event studies using...

Most industrialized countries have increased access to abortion over the past 30 years. Economic theory predicts that abortion laws affect sexual behavior since they change the marginal cost of having risky sex. We use gonorrhea incidence as a metric of risky sexual behavior. Using a panel of 41...

The aim of this paper is to determine if there is a causal relationship between children's time spent on media related activities and their weight. Since the beginning of 1980s, childhood obesity rates in the U.S. and other developed countries have been increasing. It has been suggested in the...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for 17 million births in 72 countries, we...

This research advances the hypothesis that resource abundant economies characterized by a socially cohesive workforce and network externalities triggered the emergence of efficiency-enhancing inclusive institutions designed to restrict mobility and to enhance the attachment of community members...

This research advances the hypothesis that resource abundant economies characterized by a socially cohesive workforce and network externalities triggered the emergence of efficiency-enhancing inclusive institutions designed to restrict mobility and to enhance the attachment of community members...