In sub-Saharan Africa, 60 % of child deaths are preventable by investments in child health as simple as immunizations, bed nets, or water purification. This article investigates how a household’s decisions regarding such investments are affected by the size and gender composition of a...

The ability of households to diversify their income sources is strongly related to their capacity to cope in times of pressure, such as during economic crises. This is particularly so among the poor, who often do not have adequate resources on which to draw when under such pressures. Households...

Building on anthropological evidence, we develop a model of intra-household decision making on fertility and child survival within the framework of the collective household model. We carry out a test of the implications of this framework with data from Demographic and Health Surveys in rural...

This paper estimates the impact of the extension of compulsory schooling in Turkey from 5 to 8 years—which increased the 8th grade completion rate for women by 30 percentage points—on marriage and birth outcomes of teenage women in Turkey. We find that increased compulsory schooling years...

This paper estimates the impact of the extension of compulsory schooling from 5 to 8 years in Turkey—which increased women’s schooling by more than a year—on marriage and birth outcomes of teenage women, using regression discontinuity design, where we compare month-year of birth cohorts of...

This paper explores the linkages between dowry payments and educational attainment of women. It formulates an unitary household model that captures how these linkages can potentially impact the educational investment decisions within a household. Based on existing literature and the theoretical...

We propose a causal analysis of the mother’s educational level on the health status of the newborn, in terms of gestational weeks and weight. The analysis is based on a finite mixture structural equation model, the parameters of which have a causal interpretation. The model is applied to a...

This study investigates the importance of different socio-economic conditions on skill formation by using German data from a longitudinal study, the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk, starting at birth. A rich set of psychometric variables regarding the socio-emotional environment from birth...

In 1991 Vietnam implemented a compulsory schooling reform that provides this paper a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of education on health care utilization measured by the probability of doctor visit, the frequency of doctor visit and per visit out-of-pocket expenditure with a...

Who thrives when alimony payments change? Restrictions on spousal alimony influence intra-family economic decisions by altering bargaining positions and raising concerns about post-divorce financial instability. Existing findings on restricted regimes are contradictory and need more clarity on...