Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this working paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households' decisions to invest in their education. The analysis uses variations in rainfall experienced in utero or early childhood to measure ability. It finds that rainfall...

This paper estimates the impact of armed conflict on subsequent health outcomes using detailed geographic information on households’ distance from conflict sites—a more accurate measure of conflict exposure— and compares the impact on children exposed in utero versus after birth. The...

Civil war, and genocide in particular, are among the most destructive of social phenomena, especially for children of school-going age. In Rwanda school enrollment trends suggest that the school system recovered quickly after 1994, but these numbers do not tell the full story. Two...

Child health during and after violent conflicts has been a priority for both policymakers and academics, as ill-health in early life can be impossible to make up for in later life, and has important effects on education and adult wages. In order for policy interventions to mitigate health...

To examine the impact of Rwandaś 1994 genocide on childrenś schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age groupś baseline schooling and exploits variation across...

We use Woodcock Johnson III child assessment data in the New Immigrant Survey to examine language assimilation and test score bias among children of Hispanic immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits the test language randomization (Spanish or English) to quantitatively measure the degree...