We extend the literature on the deep determinants of economic development by focusing on life expectancy, instead of income per capita, as an indicator of economic development, and by examining the role of informal, as well as formal, institutions. Our empirical results suggest that formal and...

Using primary household data from India we estimate family utility function parameters that measure the relative importance of consumption, schooling of children and health (both physical and mental) and find that mental health is far more important than consumption or children's schooling in...

Birth registration, the official recording of a child's birth by a government agency, is one of the most important events in a child's life. Birth registration establishes the existence of the child under law and provides the foundation for ensuring many of the child's rights. Although birth...

There is an on-going debate as to whether health is negatively affected by economic inequality. Still, we have limited knowledge of the mechanisms relating inequality to individual health and very little evidence comes from less-developed economies. We use individual and multi-level data from...

Anthropologists have long documented substantial and persistent differences across social groups in the preferences and taboos for particular foods. One natural question to ask is whether such food cultures matter in an economic sense. In particular, can culture constrain caloric intake and...

This Essay responds to an article by Hila Shamir previously published in the UCLA Law Review, in which she suggests that human rights has failed as a framework for addressing human trafficking and that instead a labor model would be more successful. Although her article identifies potentially...

Access to and use of health services are concerns in poor countries. If implemented correctly, health insurance may help solve these concerns. Due to selection and omitted variable bias, however, it is difficult to determine whether joining an insurance scheme improves medical care-seeking...

During the 1990s scholarship about water security abounded. However that debate abated at the ‎turn of this century. This lack of exploration is surprising, particularly given the negative impacts ‎of climate change upon the world's water resources, and the concomitant water insecurity that...

This paper quantitatively compares water infrastructure interventions that prioritize equity with those that prioritize efficiency. The community-based model developed by Haiti Outreach (HO) trains communities to operate and maintain wells, and has clear efficiency gains over the status quo aid...

We examine how an unassuming domestic technology — the fuel-efficient stove — came to be construed as an effective tool for reducing sexual violence globally. Highlighting the process of problematization, the linking of problems with actionable solutions, we show how US-based humanitarian...