Barker's fetal origins hypothesis suggests a strong relationship between in utero conditions, health, and overall child development after birth. Using a nationally representative population survey, this paper analyzes the impact of rainfall on early child health in rural India. We find that...

Almost nine million children under five years of age die every year. Diarrhea is considered to be the second leading cause of under-five mortality in developing countries. About one out of five deaths is caused by diarrhea. In this paper, we use the newly available data set DLHS-3 to quantify...

The determination of an optimal feeding and marketing strategy for a beef grazing enterprise is formulated as a dynamic programming problem. It is supposed that a decision has to be made from time to time as to whether to market animals at their current weights or to retain them for further...

Skilled attendance at childbirth is crucial for decreasing maternal and neonatal mortality, yet many women in low- and middle-income countries deliver outside of health facilities, without skilled help. Distance to health facility is considered to be an important non-monetary barrier that impede...

Using data from a representative sample from India, we test the empirical validity of Quantity-Quality tarde-off model of Becker and Lewis (1973). To address the endogeneity arising from the joint determination of quantity and quality of children by parents, we instrument the family size by sex...

Does microcredit empower women, or does it just discipline and control them in a new way? This paper draws on the case of self-help groups (SHG) in rural India to shed light on microcredit’s various contradictory effects. By adopting the rules of patronage, SHGs renew the domination of women...

In the last decade, the Foreign Institutional Investor (FII) flows have increased almost twenty times and attained shares of thirteen and six percent in the National Stock Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchanges respectively in the cash segment of the Indian equity market. This raises the issue of...

Rates of neonatal and maternal mortality are high in Ghana. In-facility delivery and other maternal services could reduce this burden, yet utilization rates of key maternal services are relatively low, especially in rural areas. We tested a theoretical implication that travel time negatively...

In this paper, we investigate the impact of political decentralization and gender quota in local governance on different measures of health outcomes and behaviors. We use multiple waves of District Level Household Survey (DLHS) for two states in India, Bihar and Jharkhand, and employ...