The article explores the effect of primary school access, type (public vs. private), and quality on parents' decision to enroll their children in rural Pakistan using a 1997 survey. The authors find that, for girls, living in a village with an all-girls' public school makes a significant...

Due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, sub-Saharan populations are challenged with increasing adult mortality rates that have potentially profound economic implications. Yet little is known about the impact of adult deaths in African households. Using panel data from Tanzania, this article will explore...

We examine the importance of family background for early childhood development (ECD) using data collected in 2001 from 3,556 children ages 0-36 months in three regions of the Philippines. We focus on four main research questions: (1) are associations of family background with ECD in part...

Acrimonious relations between employers and employees in developing countries have often been cited as impediments to progress. This article considers various measures of labor disputes and investigates whether these have detrimental effects on the location choice of new domestic investment...

Despite the attractiveness of experiments from the perspective of program evaluation, there have been very few program experiments in the area of family planning. This article evaluates an ongoing family planning program experiment in rural Bangladesh. The article estimates the effect of...

Cross-country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and/or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain "social efficiency," analogously to "technical efficiency" in production. The article argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what is being...

Why has growth in the Arab world been so disappointing? Stagnating since 1985, the little growth that does exist is volatile and unstable, and the region has lagged behind both the gains of other developing countries and the region's own pre-1985 performance. This article attempts to encourage...

This study investigates the determinants of labor force participation and child care utilization of mothers in the slums of Guatemala City. Data come from a survey in 1999 of 1,300 randomly selected mothers with preschool children, out of whom 37% worked for pay in the last 30 days. Results show...

This article examines the determinants of human and physical capital at marriage. Using detailed data from rural Ethiopia, we find that assets brought to marriage are distributed in a highly unequal manner. For first unions, assets brought to marriage are positively associated with parents'...

The rapid increase in adult mortality due to the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa raises great concern about potential intergenerational effects on children. This article estimates the impact of AIDS-related adult mortality on primary school attendance in rural Kenya using a panel of 1,266...