Health at birth is an important indicator of human capital development over the life course. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Young Lives survey and employs instrumental variable regression models to estimate the effect of birth weight on cognitive development during childhood in...

Gender gaps in skills exist around the world but differ remarkably among the high and low-and-middle income countries. This paper uses a unique data set with more than 20,000 adolescents in rural India to examine whether socioeconomic status and gender attitudes predict gender gaps in cognitive...

Food coma, also known as postprandial somnolence, is a commonly cited reason for experiencing reduced alertness during mid-afternoon worldwide. By using exogenous variation in the timing of tests and, hence, by extension, plausibly exogenous variation in the temporal distance between an...

Summan, Nandi, and Bloom (2023; SNB) finds that exposure of babies to India's Universal Immunization Programme (UIP) in the late 1980s increased their weekly wages in early adulthood by 0.138 log points and per-capita household consumption 0.028 points. But the results are attained by regressing on...

A rich literature has documented the relationship between age at marriage and girls’ health and educational outcomes. The COVID-19 pandemic has been hypothesized to have influenced household decision making on the age of marriage. On the one hand, COVID-19 may have increased the age at...

Natural disasters can lead to significant changes in health, economic, and demographic outcomes. However, the demographic effects of earthquakes have been studied only to a limited degree. This paper examines the effect of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, which killed more than 20,000 people,...

Evidence on the long-term benefits of early-life interventions remains inadequate in developing countries. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), a national program of supplementary nutrition and health services, on schooling. Using...