The burgeoning use of ordinal data throughout the Empirical Sciences calls for location and variation measurement instruments suitable for such data environments. Neither Pearson’s Coefficient of Variation nor the Sharpe Ratio, relative variation comparison workhorses in cardinal worlds, are...

This paper uses microdata from Brazilian natality and mortality vital statistics between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in-utero exposure to local violence - measured by homicide rates - on birth outcomes. The estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of...

We study how prenatal maternal stress, caused by sustained seismic activity, affects birth outcomes in Chile during the period 2011-2015. A mother-fixed-effect model together with the spatiotemporal variation of earthquakes in Chile allow us to deal with identification issues that have obscured...

This paper investigates impacts, mechanisms and selection effects of prenatal exposure to multiple shocks, by exploiting the unique natural experiment of the Dutch Hunger Winter. At the end of World War II, a famine occurred abruptly in the Western Netherlands (November 1944 - May 1945),...

Pregnancy loss is often a traumatic event which may impact both parents and subsequent children. Using Norwegian registry data, we exploit the random nature of single, early miscarriages to examine the impact of pregnancy loss on parental investment and family outcomes. We find that pregnancy...