One goal of the paid family leave (PFL) is to help working mothers balance their careers and family responsibilities and hence improve the well-being of their infants. However, most studies of PFL on early childhood outcomes have been based on the analyses of surviving infants. If PFL reduces...

We examine the impact of health and economic conditions at birth on the adult outcomes of child immigrants using the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study. Our sample consists of children from 39 countries who were brought to the United States before the age of 13. We estimate immigrant...

Oil spills can lead to irreversible environmental degradation and pose hazards to human health. We are the first to study the causal effects of onshore oil spills on neonatal and infant mortality rates. We use spatial data from the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor and the Demographic and Health...

This paper studies the dynamics of fertility in 180 countries in the period 1950ñ 2015 and investigates the determinants of the onset of fertility transitions. The application of Phillips and Sulís (2007) test to fertility rates provides evidence of convergence in three groups of countries....

Leveraging close elections to generate quasi-random variation in the religious identity of state legislators in India, we find lower rates of female foeticide in districts with Muslim legislators, which we argue reflects a greater (religious) aversion to abortion among Muslims. These districts...

A recently growing literature evaluates the influence of early-life conditions on life-cycle health and mortality. This paper extends this literature by estimating the associations between birth-state infant mortality rates experienced during early-life (as a proxy for general disease...

Early life conditions have been linked to various domains of later life health, including cardiovascular outcomes. Using life history data from 13 European countries, I find that childhood socioeconomic status and measures of childhood health are related to hypertension, although there is cross...

The rural-urban gap in infant mortality rates is explained using a new decomposition method that permits identification of the ontribution of unobserved heterogeneity at the household and the community level. Using Demographic and Health Survey data for six Francophone countries in Western...

We examine the impact of air pollution on infant death in California over the 1990s. Our work offers several innovations: First, many previous studies examine populations subject to far greater levels of pollution. In contrast, the experience of California in the 1990s is clearly relevant to...

This paper exploits a unique opportunity to evaluate the impact of the quality change in the labor and delivery services on maternal and infant health. Since basic medical care has been universally available in Ukraine, implementation of the Mother and Infant Health Project allows addressing...