Poverty is again at the center of debates about development. Dominant international institutions have committed themselves to addressing poverty, notably the World Bank, through its Poverty Reduction Strategies, and the United Nations, through the Millennium Development Goals. Discussion has...

Hurricane Katrina displaced approximately 650,000 people and destroyed or severely damaged 217,000 homes along the Gulf Coast. Damage was especially severe in New Orleans, and the return of displaced residents to this city has been slow. The fraction of households receiving mail (which, in the...

Roll Back Malaria aims at halving the current burden of the disease by the year 2010. The focus is on sub-Saharan Africa, and it is proposed to implement efficacious and costeffective control strategies. However, the evidence-base of such information is scarce, and a notable missing element is...

The channels by which better health leads to higher income, and those by which higher income protects health status, are of interest to both researchers and policy makers. In general, quantifying the impact of income on health is difficult, given the simultaneous determination of health and...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of returning to New Orleans in the 18 months after the hurricane. The data come from a study of low-income parents—mainly African American women—who were enrolled in a community college intervention prior to the hurricane. Although the sample is not...

Research across a number of disciplines has highlighted the role of early life health and circumstance in determining health and economic outcomes at older ages. Nutrition in utero and in infancy may set the stage for the chronic disease burden that an individual will face in middle age (David...

This study focuses on 540 households originally living in public housing in high-poverty areas of Boston who participated in HUD’s Moving To Opportunity (MTO) demonstration. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: Experimental – offered mobility counseling and a Section 8...

We analyze the effects of neighborhood characteristics on the mortality of black male youth in families relocated through the Gautreaux program, a residential mobility program implemented in Chicago in 1976. While we find significant evidence of neighborhood selfselection by families...

The effect of macroeconomic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the impact of a profound crisis in Peru on infant mortality. We show that there was an increase in the infant mortality rate of about 2.5...

That wealthy people live longer and have lower morbidity, on average, than do poor people has been well documented across countries, within countries at a point in time, and over time with economic growth. The positive correlation between income and health is not limited to the bottom end of the...