The authors analyze the interaction between a country's world market integration and its attitude towards gender roles. They discuss both theoretically and empirically how female empowerment is a source of comparative advantage that shapes a country's response to trade opening. Reciprocally, the...

As natural disasters hit with increasing frequency, especially in coastal areas, it is imperative to better understand how much natural disasters affect economies and their people. This requires disaggregated measures of natural disasters that can be reliably linked to households, the first...

During the Vietnam War, more than 70 million liters of military herbicide were sprayed over the combat zone. This study uses self and proxy-reported data on cancer status obtained from a nationally representative health survey of the Vietnamese population (N=158,019), combined with measures of...

The authors survey the recent literature on the mental health effects of conflict. They highlight the methodological challenges faced in this literature, which include the lack of validated mental health scales in a survey context, the difficulties in measuring individual exposure to conflict,...

Using a database of 76,046 empirical economics papers published between 1985 and 2004 in the top 202 economics journals, the authors report two associations. First, per-capita research output on a given country increases with the country's per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Regressions...

The authors use recent data from the 2006 National Family Health Survey of India to explore the relationship between religion and demographic behavior. They find that fertility and mortality vary not only between religious groups, but also across caste groups. These groups also differ with...