Taller populations are typically richer populations, and taller individuals live longer and earn more In consequence, adult height has recently become a focus in understanding the relationship between health and wealth. We investigate the childhood determinants of population adult height,...

I argue that progress in understanding economic development (as in other branches of economics) must come from the investigation of mechanisms; the associated empirical analysis can usefully employ a wide range of experimental and non-experimental methods. I discuss three different areas of...

A growing literature documents the links between long-term outcomes and health in the fetal period, infancy, and early childhood. Much of this literature focuses on rich countries, but researchers are increasingly taking advantage of new sources of data and identification to study the long reach...

We use data from the Gallup World Poll and from the Demographic and Health Surveys to investigate how subjective wellbeing (SWB) is affected by mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, including mortality from HIV/AIDS. The Gallup data provide direct evidence on Africans’ own emotional and evaluative...

This paper reviews recent research on the relationship between education and health in poor countries. Multiple causal pathways link the two domains, across different phases of an individual’s lifecycle and across generations in a family. Within an individual, childhood health enhances...

Discussions of cross-sectional fertility heterogeneity and its interaction with economic growth typically assume that the poor have more children than the rich. Micro-data from 48 developing countries suggest that this phenomenon is very recent. Over the second half of the twentieth century,...

Luigi Bodio (1840-1920) was an Italian economist and statistician, considered one of the founders of the Italian Statistics. He was one of the 21 founding members of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) in 1885, ISI Director-General during the first 20 years (1885-1905) and ISI...

The practice of informal child fostering is pervasive in the Caribbean and other parts of the developing world. While the reasons for fostering out a child are clear it is not clear why an individual would accept the task of caring for someone else's child. In this paper we argue that acceptance...

Although the effect of the migration process on the family has been extensively studied, much less attention has been given to the impact of migration on children, especially those children who are left behind. Children whose parents have migrated are usually looked after by members of their...

The article contains a review of the contemporary research in the field of economics of happiness. Economics of happiness deals with correlation between the subjective notion of well-being and happiness with one’s life (happiness level) and economic indicators. The author considers the...