On average, child health outcomes are better in urban than in rural areas of developing countries. Understanding the nature and the causes of this rural-urban disparity is essential in contemplating the health consequences of the rapid urbanization taking place throughout the developing world...

Historically, improvements in the quality of municipal drinking water made important contributions to mortality decline in wealthy countries. However, water disinfection often does not produce equivalent benefits in developing countries today. We investigate this puzzle by analyzing an abrupt,...

Africa's quest to achieving improved health status and meeting the Millennium Development Goals targets cannot be effectively achieved without examining the quality of leadership, transitions and regimes and how they impact on the decisions and the policy effectiveness that bring about improved...

This paper analyses the health-improving effects of introducing four different constitutional social and environmental human rights (health, free education, adequate living (or welfare), and environment) and the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) into national constitution and...

We study the causal effect of trade liberalization on child mortality by exploiting 41 policy reform experiments in the 1960-2010 period. The Synthetic Control Method for comparative case studies allows to compare at the country level the trajectory of post-reform health outcomes of treated...

Historically, improvements municipal drinking water quality contributed significantly to mortality decline in wealthy countries. However, water disinfection has not produced equivalent benefits in developing countries today. We investigate this puzzle by analyzing a large-scale municipal water...

We show that ethnic distances can explain the ethnic inequalities in child mortality rates in Africa. Using individual level micro data from DHS surveys for fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries combined with a novel high resolution dataset on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups we show...

A key aim of economics is to set goals and investigate the relationship between various socio-economic indicators. By fitting time series data using a Bayesian dynamical systems approach we identify non-linear interactions between GDP, child mortality, fertility rate and female education. We...