Anemia impairs physical and cognitive development in children and reduces human capital accumulation. The prior economics literature has focused on the role of inadequate nutrition in causing anemia. This paper is the first to show that sanitation, a public good, significantly contributes to...

In this paper, we shed new light on a long-standing puzzle: In India, Muslim children are substantially more likely than Hindu children to survive to their first birthday, even though Indian Muslims have lower wealth, consumption, educational attainment, and access to state services. Contrary to...

Inversions--in which the popular vote winner loses the election--have occurred in 4 US Presidential elections. We show that rather than being statistical flukes, inversions have been ex ante likely since the 1800s. In elections yielding a popular vote margin within one percentage point (which...

We study how extreme weather exposure impacts infant survival in the developing world. Our analysis overcomes the absence of vital registration systems in many poor countries by extracting birth histories from household surveys. Studying 53 developing countries that span five continents, we find...

Extremely narrow election outcomes--such as could be reversed by rejecting a few thousand ballots--are likely to trigger dispute over the results. Narrow vote tallies may generate recounts and litigation; they may be resolved by courts or elections administrators (e.g., Secretaries of State...

Birth rates are falling worldwide, in every region. Falling birth rates can be decomposed into two components: (1) an increase in childlessness (i.e., lifetime nulliparity), and (2) fewer children ever born to women who have at least one child (completed cohort fertility among the parous). This...

A smaller human population would emit less carbon, other things equal, but how large is the effect? Here we test the widely-shared view that an important benefit of the ongoing, global decline in fertility will be reductions in long-run temperatures. We contrast a baseline of global depopulation...