The identification of factors affecting birth weight is a key issue in human development due to its established associations with long-term health, educational and labour-market outcomes. This paper exploits intergenerational information on three generations (grandparents-parents-children) to...

A country's statistical capacity takes an indispensable part in its development. We offer a comprehensive comparison between the World Bank's Statistical Performance Indicators and Index (SPI) and its predecessor, the Statistical Capacity Index (SCI) regarding different conceptual and empirical...

Many parents return to work, placing their child in nonparental care before the age of one. Using variations in daycare vacancy rates, we estimate the causal effects of enrollment age in universal daycare on child development. In general, we find no evidence that earlier enrollment harms early...

A large share of young mothers return to work before their child turns one year. Exploiting exogenous variation in daycare vacancy rates, we estimate the causal effects of enrollment age in universal daycare on child development for children younger than two years. We find modest effects of...

The international development debate is increasingly referring to the notion of the "social contract" - often, however, without a clear definition of the term and its implications. We therefore make a suggestion for measuring at least some elements of social contracts in order to make it easier...

KIDS COUNT is a national and state-by-state effort to track the status of children in the U.S. Ten key measures comprise an index of child well-being used to rank states and supplemental data on education, health, and economic conditions for each state. Data from the 2003 KIDS COUNT Data Book...

This paper is the first to estimate the causal effect of local human capital stock on individual adiposity and adds to the existing literature on estimating human capital externalities at the neighborhood level. We explore the possible causal pathways that college-educated neighbors exert on...

This study assesses temporal and spatial distribution of child deprivation and income poverty using the fifth and sixth rounds of the Ghana Living Standards Survey. The first-order dominance methodology was used to examine five dimensions of deprivation of children aged 7 to 17 years, and the...

Since redemocratization in 1985, Brazil's system of social protection became more focused on the neediest while at the same time emphasizing universal access, especially focusing education and healthcare. In a traditional context of severe inequality, the sub-national units of government played...

Alcohol is considered one of the most serious threats to population health, and to mitigate its negative consequences, most countries have implemented policies such as minimum legal drinking ages (MLDAs). Denmark, a country with an exceptionally liberal youth alcohol culture, introduced a...