This paper provides evidence on household responses to the relaxation of one barrier constraining adoption of health practices - lack of information - in a resource constrained setting. It examines the effects of a randomized intervention in Malawi which provides mothers with information on...

We examine Trevon Logan's 2009 claim to have found low levels of nutrition among British worker's households in the late 19th century. Using the same data, we conclude that Logan's estimates are thirty percent too low. Logan buttressed his estimates by claiming that the income elasticity of...

Medical expenditure risk can pose a major threat to living standards. We derive decomposable measures of catastrophic medical expenditure risk from reference-dependent utility with loss aversion. We propose a quantile regression based method of estimating risk exposure from cross-section data...

Children living in the occupied Palestinian territories are exposed to poverty as well as continued physical and psychological violence and human rights violations, leading to low levels of mental health compared to children in Western countries. We use test score and survey data on...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

We study the long-term determinants of the high rates of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly among women, with a focus on family structure and sexual behavior as shaped by the demographic shock following the transatlantic slave trade. First we show that, in clusters where polygyny...

This paper studies child health in India focusing on differences in anthropometric outcomes between the three main religions - Hindus, Muslims and Christians. The results indicate that Christian infants have higher height-for-age z-scores as compared to infants of other religious identities, and...

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian natality and mortality vital statistics between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence - measured by homicide rates - on birth outcomes. The estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of...

We analyze the economic consequences for less developed countries of investing in female health. In so doing we introduce a novel micro-founded dynamic general equilibrium framework in which parents trade off the number of children against investments in their education and in which we allow for...

The research objective of this paper is to test whether health conditions and health behavior are related to home ownership. This question has not yet been examined quantitatively in the existing literature. Our estimation results show that homeowners consistently report better health and less...