During the Vietnam War, more than 70 million liters of military herbicide were sprayed over the combat zone. This study uses self and proxy-reported data on cancer status obtained from a nationally representative health survey of the Vietnamese population (N=158,019), combined with measures of...

Poor health at birth has negative long-run effects on individual well-being and is also detrimental for intergenerational mobility. This paper examines whether health outcomes at birth are affected by in utero increased exposure to rainfall and temperature shocks in Colombia, one of 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...

Aid to developing countries has largely neglected the population-wide health services that are core to communicable disease control in the developed world. These mostly non-clinical services generate"pure public goods"by reducing everyone's exposure to disease through measures such as...

Understanding the demographic and socioeconomic patterns of the prevalence and incidence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa is crucial for developing programs and policies to combat HIV/AIDS. This paper looks critically at the methods and analytical challenges to study the links between...

The authors survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. They highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual exposure to conflict,...

People migrate to improve their well-being, whether through an expansion of economic and social opportunities or a reduction in persecution. Yet a large literature suggests that migration can be a stressful process, with potentially negative impacts on mental health, reducing the net benefits of...

This paper analyzes the socioeconomic determinants of HIV infection and related sexual behaviors using the 2004Lesotho Demographic and Health Survey. The authors find that in Lesotho education appears to have a protective effect: it is negatively associated with HIV infection (although not...

The 1997 Indonesian financial crisis resulted in severe economic dislocation and political upheaval, and the detrimental consequences for economic welfare, physical health, and child education have been previously established in numerous studies. We also find the crisis adversely impacted...