The health status of people is a precious commodity and central to economic, socio-political, and environmental dimensions of any country. Yet it is often the missing statistic in all general statistics, demographics, and presentations about the portrait of immigrants and natives. In this paper...

This paper examines the long-term impacts of growth and development monitoring in early childhood. For this purpose, we evaluate a pediatric healthcare program, the Systematic Management of Children (SMC), which offers growth and development monitoring through routine health checkups for all...

This paper demonstrates the prevalence, pervasiveness, persistence, and resilience of a system of non-Big God religious beliefs, in absence of religious organizations and moralizing prescriptions, thanks to a self-fulfilling mechanism based on social insurance. We focus on the Vietnamese’s...

We investigate the effects of incentivizing early prenatal care utilization on infant health by exploiting a reform that required expectant mothers to initiate prenatal care during the first ten weeks of gestation to obtain a one-time monetary transfer paid after childbirth. Applying a...

This chapter reviews the literature on the causal effects of policies on fertility. It focuses on evidence from experiments and quasi-experiments in low fertility contexts, including studies from Europe, Northern America, Oceania and Asia. Making no a priori restrictions on policy type, the...

This paper reexamines the design of the optimal lockdown strategy by paying attention to its robustness to the postulated social welfare criterion. We first characterize optimal lockdown under utilitarianism, and we show that this social criterion can, under some conditions, imply a COVID-19...

We use a panel survey of ∼19,000 primary-school-aged children in rural Tamil Nadu to study "learning loss" after COVID-19-induced school closures, and the pace of recovery after schools reopened. Students tested in December 2021 (18 months after school closures) displayed learning deficits of...