Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that demand for schooling is...

Although child mortality rates have declined all across the developing world over the past 40 years, they have declined the most in the Middle East and North Africa region. This paper documents this remarkable experience and shows that it is broad based in the sense that all countries in the...

Incentive-based policies have been shown to be powerful in many areas of behavior, but have rarely been tested in the sexual domain. The Rewarding Sexually Transmitted Infection Prevention and Control in Tanzania (RESPECT) study is a randomized controlled trial testing the hypothesis that a...

Formal and informal commercial sex work is a way of life for many poor women in developing countries. Though sex workers have long been identified as crucial in affecting the spread of HIV/AIDS, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the nature of sex-for-money transactions remains poorly...

Are wanted and unwanted children treated equally by their parents? To address this question, the authors rely on the observation that, according to Vietnamese astrology, dates of birth are believed to be determinants of success, luck, character, and good match between individuals. They then...

Since the early 1990s, several states in India have introduced financial incentive programs to discourage son preference among parents and encourage investment in daughters'education and health. This study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana, Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughter, Our...

Information, education, communication and interventions based on behavioral-change communication have had success in increasing the awareness of HIV. But these strategies alone have been less successful in changing risky sexual behavior. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the link...

Substantial declines in infant and under-5 mortality have taken place in recent years in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Kenya's infant mortality rate has fallen by 7.6 percent per year, the fastest rate of decline among the 20 countries in the region for which recent Demographic and...

Data from three rounds of nationally representative health surveys in India are used to assess the impact of selective mortality on children’s anthropometrics. The nutritional status of the child population was simulated under the counterfactual scenario that all children who died in the first...

Although reproductive health advocates consider family planning programs the intervention of choice to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of skepticism among economists as to their effectiveness, despite little rigorous evidence to support either position. This study explores the...