In recent years, significant advances have been made in better understanding the complex relationships between health and development. This reflects the combined effects of methodological innovations at both the theoretical and empirical level, the integration of insights from the biological and...

This chapter reviews recent advances in the empirical literature on the role that households and families play in investing in human resources. It describes the estimation of reduced form demands for human capital, particularly education and health. Special attention is paid to the measurement...

Oportunidades was an innovative anti-poverty program that put additional resources in the hands of women and their families and encouraged parents to invest in the human capital of their children. This program was the first in its kind, and early evaluations demonstrating its success informed...

In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray demonstrate that a mother's score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test is a powerful predictor of her child's score on a cognitive achievement test. We replicate this finding. However, even after controlling for maternal scores, there are significant...

Research on Head Start suggests that effects on test scores "fade out" more quickly for black children than for white children. We use data from the 1988 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Survey to show that Head Start black children go on to attend schools of worse quality than...

Migration choices of husbands and wives in a dynamic and developing country are studied in the context of an economic model of the household. Data are drawn from the second wave of the Malaysia Family Life Survey. Exploiting the retrospective histories, we compare moves that take place before...

Data from two waves of the Child-Mother module of the National Longitudinal Surveys are used to examine the medical care received by children. We compare those covered by Medicaid, by private health insurance and those with no insurance coverage at all. We find there are substantial differences...

A concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes t he notion that there are groups of goods (adult goods) that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics (the numbers or ages of children). That there exist adult goods demographically separable...

The literature suggests that men and women may have different preferences. This paper exploits a social experiment in which women in treatment households were given a large public cash transfer (PROGRESA). In an effort to disentangle the effect of additional income in the household from the...

Specially collected data on adults in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer-term effects of Head Start, an early intervention program for poor preschool-age children. Whites who attended Head Start are, relative to their siblings who did not, significantly...