Raising women's political participation leads to faster maternal mortality decline. We estimate that the introduction of quotas for women in parliament results in a 9 to 12% decline in maternal mortality. In terms of mechanisms, it also leads to an 8 to 11% increase in skilled birth attendance...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for 17 million births in 72 countries, we...

We study the mechanism of action of an early-life social safety net program, and quantify its impact on child health outcomes at birth. We consider both the equity and efficiency implications of program impacts, and provide a metric to compare various such programs around the world. In...

Twin births are often used to instrument fertility to address (negative) selection of women into fertility. However recent work shows positive selection of women into twin birth. Thus, while OLS estimates will tend to be downward biased, twin-IV estimates will tend to be upward biased. This is...

Raising women's political participation leads to faster maternal mortality decline. We estimate that the introduction of quotas for women in parliament results in a 9-12 per cent decline in maternal mortality. In terms of mechanisms, it also leads to an 8-11 per cent increase in skilled birth...

We examine the link between public spending in health and health outcomes by leveraging differential exposure to a health spending reform prompted by Brazil's 29th Constitutional Amendment, which mandated municipalities to spend at least 15% of their budget on health. We map dynamic effects on...

Wildfires are increasing in frequency and intensity. We study the impact of exposure to wildfires on air pollutants and on human health in Chile, finding substantial impacts on both classes of outcomes. We use data on 15 wildfire seasons (2004-2018) matched with granular (intra-day) records of...

When considering multiple hypothesis tests simultaneously, standard statistical techniques will lead to over-rejection of null hypotheses unless the multiplicity of the testing framework is explicitly considered. In this paper we discuss the Romano-Wolf multiple hypothesis correction, and...

We examine the sharp expansion in availability of the emergency contraceptive pill in Chile following legalized access through municipal public health-care centres. Combining a number of administrative datasets on health outcomes and pharmaceutical use, and using difference-in-difference and...