This study explores how aridity (proxied with a measure of soil potential evapotranspiration) impacts agricultural productivity and child wellbeing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Climate conditions, crop yield, and infant health measures are collected over approximately 4,000 grid cells of 0.5 x 0.5 in...

This study shows how soil aridity (proxied with a measure of soil potential evapotranspiration) impacts child wellbeing in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using climate and infant health data from a grid of approximately 4,000 cells in 34 African countries, we find that infants born in arid areas are...

Motivated by a recent setback in the fight against child malnutrition, this study explores whether aid projects help to reduce stunting, or impaired growth, among children in the local area. Focusing on Malawi, a country with very high stunting prevalence and for which we have access to...

Waterborne diseases lead to over 6 billion diarrheal episodes per year, with most of the burden on children in low-income countries. We employ hydrological engineering principles to construct a novel measure of stagnant water, crucial to the spread of these diseases. Using a...

Incorrect knowledge of the health production function may lead to inefficient household choices, and thereby to the production of suboptimal levels of health. This paper studies the effects of a randomised intervention in rural Malawi which, over a six-month period, provided mothers of young...

The poor state of child health in India has generated a number of puzzles that have received attention in the literature. A recent focus on birth order has produced contradictory results. Coffey and Spears (2019) document an early-life survival advantage in India accruing to later birth orders,...

This paper estimates flexible child health production functions to investigate whether better water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) practices make nutrition intake more productive for children aged 6-24 months. Using cohort data, with detailed information on nutrition intake and WASH...

Expansion in access to public infrastructure can have varied, micro-level impacts. In this paper, we use quasi-random access to rural paved roads through a large-scale road-construction program in India to study how road access impacts fertility decisions and investments in child health. We find...

In sub-Saharan Africa, child fostering-a widespread practice in which a child moves out of the household of her biological parents-can have significant implications for a child's overall well-being. Using longitudinal data from South Africa that includes individual tracking, we employ double...