This paper uses the implementation of a privately funded family planning program in Colorado to demonstrate that expanding access to long-acting reversible contraceptives to lower income women creates positive selection in the health of the children being born, reducing the rates of extremely...

Using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, this study finds a strong income gradient in preventive medication use among children with asthma. Further examination reveals the source of the gradient to be newly diagnosed children. Part of the gradient among newly diagnosed children is...

Bans on sex-selective abortions, typically implemented to make sex ratios more equitable, may have adverse welfare consequences on surviving children. Exploiting the intertemporal variation in the implementation of a ban on sex-screening and sex-selection in India, we examine the impact of the...

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...

We evaluate the impact of oral polio vaccines on the incidence of disabilities in India, focusing on polio-related disability. Polio was hyperendemic in India even as recently as the early 1990s but the country was declared wild polio virus-free in 2014. Average treatment effects on the treated...

Supporting working mothers to balance their work and childcare responsibilities is a central objective of maternal and parental leave policies. Nearly all countries offer some forms of maternity and family leave programs for childbearing on a national basis. This chapter reviews various types of...

This paper demonstrates that expanding access to Long-Acting Reversible Contraceptives (LARCs) to lower-income women creates positive selection in the health of the cohorts of children being born. I exploit the staggered timing of three privately funded programs which distributed LARCs at no...

Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we estimate the impact of breastfeeding initiation and duration on multiple cognitive, health, and behavioral outcomes spanning early childhood through adolescence. To mitigate the potential bias from misspecification, we employ a doubly robust...

We assess the impact of fully paid maternity leave on maternal health in the year after birth. We exploit a sudden expansion of paid leave from 6 to 12 weeks in the United States Army and Air Force to estimate impacts under regression discontinuity and difference in differences frameworks....

The vast majority of youth e-cigarette users consume flavored e-cigarettes, raising concerns from public health advocates that flavors may drive youth initiation into and continued use of e-cigarettes. Flavors drew further notice from the public health community following the sudden outbreak of...