Standard methods of poverty measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods can provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...

This paper reexamines differences found between income gradients in American and English children's health, in results originally published by Case, Lubotsky and Paxson (2002) for the US, and by Currie, Shields and Wheatley Price (2007) for England. We find that, when the English sample is...

A rich array of institutional diversity makes the United States an excellent place to study the relationship between political institutions and public policy outcomes. This essay has three main aims. It reviews empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional rules, political...

That educational inputs should be important determinants of educational outcomes is a proposition that appeals to common sense, but is nevertheless controversial in the literature both for developed and lessdeveloped countries. Surveys by Hanushek (1986), for developed countries, and (1996), for...

Women have worse self-rated health and more hospitalization episodes than men from early adolescence to late middle age, but are less likely to die at each age. We use 14 years of data from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey to examine this paradox. Our results indicate that the...

We examine patterns of health seeking behavior prior to death among 1282 individuals who lived in the Umkhanyakude District of Northern KwaZulu-Natal. Information on the health care choices of these individuals, who died between January 2003 and July 2004, was gathered after their deaths from...

Standard methods of poverty measurement assume that an individual is poor if he or she lives in a family whose income or consumption lies below an appropriate poverty line. Such methods can provide only limited insight into male and female poverty separately. Nevertheless, there are reasons why...

The effect of school inputs on labor market outcomes is an important and controversial topic, both in the United States and in developing countries. A large literature about American schools has not settled debate on the issue. Card and Krueger (1992) estimate the effect of pupil/teacher ratios...

We analyze longitudinal data from a demographic surveillance area (DSA) in KwaZulu-Natal, to examine the impact of parental death on children’s outcomes. We find significant differences in the impact of mothers’ and fathers’ deaths. The loss of a child’s mother is a strong predictor of...