This paper studies the long-term health and economic consequences of China's Household Responsibility System (HRS) reform—a property reform that assigned collectively owned farmland to individual households with secure tenures and boosted labor productivity among rural populations. Using...

Do merit-based recruitment policies encourage individuals to climb socioeconomic ladders? We provide evidence from historical Taiwan, where elite bureaucrats were recruited through a civil service examination. Quotas for successful candidates were set based on the 1948 populations of...

We estimate the effects of higher quality healthcare usage on health, labor supply and schooling outcomes for sick individuals in Tanzania. Using exogenous variation in the cost of formal sector healthcare to predict treatment choice, we show that using better quality care improves health...

Models of the agricultural household have traditionally relied on assumptions regarding the complementarity or substitutability of family labor inputs. We show how data on time allocations, health shocks and corresponding treatment choices can be used to test these assumptions. Data from...

Self-selection into healthcare options biases estimates of the effects of healthcare on health outcomes. We exploit exogenous variation in the cost of formal-sector care to show that the use of such care improves short-term health outcomes for acutely ill children in Tanzania. Better...

Standard theories of resource allocation within the household posit that parents' investments in their children reflect a combination of children's endowments and parents' preferences for child quality. We study how changes in children's cognitive endowments affect the distribution of parental...

We study the origins of adult mental health using early life income fluctuations.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we show that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the...

We study the origins of adult mental health using early life income fluctuations. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we show that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the...

Standard theories of resource allocation within the household posit that parents’ investments in their children reflect a combination of children’s endowments and parents’ preferences for child quality. We study how changes in children’s cognitive endowments affect the distribution of...

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early...