A central policy issue in the battle against HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is whether and when high-prevalence countries might become fully autonomous in designing and implementing their own intervention policies aimed to control the disease. The aim of this research is twofold. First, it...

We study the historical origins of cross-country differences in the male-to-female sex ratio. Our analysis focuses on the use of the plough in traditional agriculture. In societies that did not use the plough, women tended to participate in agriculture as actively as men. By contrast, in...

This paper examines how traditional marriage market institutions affect households' financial decisions. We study how bride-to-groom marriage payments, i.e., dowries, influence saving behavior in rural India. Exploiting variation in firstborn gender and heterogeneity in dowry amounts across...

We investigate the impact of an economic downturn on natality and birthweight for newborns when parents prefer sons. We examine South Korea, unexpectedly hit by the Asian financial crisis in 1997. For identification, we exploit regional and time variation in the crisis, focusing on women who...

This paper explores gene-environmental interactions between family environments and children's genetic scores in determining educational attainment. The central question is whether poor childhood family environments reduce the ability for children to leverage their genetic gifts to achieve high...

A shift in population distribution toward older ages is underway in industrialised countries throughout the world and will continue well into the future. We provide a framework for isolating the pure effects of population aging on per capita GDP, employ the framework in calculations for twenty...

The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

There is a growing trend of buying homes among the single population in the U.S. This trend has been referred to as "Going Solo" and is particularly evident among women who are the focus of our study. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that homeownership probabilities can be affected by...

I examine how one central aspect of the childhood family environment – sibling gender composition – affects women's gender conformity, measured through their choice of occupation and partner. Using Danish administrative data, I causally estimate the effect of having a second-born brother...

We study how extreme weather exposure impacts infant survival in the developing world. Our analysis overcomes the absence of vital registration systems in many poor countries by extracting birth histories from household surveys. Studying 53 developing countries that span five continents, we find...