We experimentally test if enabling individuals to incentivize others to socialize with them can strengthen social networks and improve well-being. We examine family planning access for women in India, who tend to be socially isolated and for whom peer support may overcome intrahousehold...

Fertility has a strong biological component generally ignored by economists. Using the UK Biobank, we analyze the extent to which genes, proxied by polygenic scores, and the environment, proxied by early exposure to the contraceptive pill diffusion, affect age at first sexual intercourse, age at...

Fertility has a strong biological component generally ignored by economists. Using the UK Biobank, we analyze the extent to which genes, proxied by polygenic scores, and the environment, proxied by early exposure to the contraceptive pill diffusion, affect age at first sexual intercourse, age at...

Nearly a quarter of all children under the age of two in China are left behind in the countryside as parents migrate to urban areas for work. We use a longitudinal survey following young children and their caregivers from 6 to 30 months of age to estimate the effects of maternal migration on...

How does women's empowerment affect fertility and children’s education? In a dramatic revolution, U.S. states gave economic rights to married women between 1850-1920. Prior to this "women's liberation," married women were subject to the laws of coverture, which granted the husband virtually...

I study how bias in agricultural technological change affects labor market opportunities and fertility in a modern developing country context. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the adoption of genetically engineered soy across municipalities in Brazil, I show that these technologies...

We revisit the effect of long run income growth on population fertility in some of the poorest countries in the world. Causal inference is enabled through proxying income windfalls by oil price shocks in oil rich versus oil poor provinces. Using various fertility measures as outcomes, we find...

There have been few empirical studies in the developing world and the agricultural sector, on the impact of negative health shocks on household well-being. Does the pervasive effect of a negative household-level health shock persist beyond its initial impact and indirectly affect long-run...

We provide experimental evidence on the effects of vocational and entrepreneurial training for Malawian youth, in an environment where access to schooling and formal sector employment is extremely low. We track a large fraction of program drop-outs – a common phenomenon in the training...

We evaluate the long-term impact of treating maternal depression on women’s financial empowerment and parenting decisions. We leverage experimental variation induced by a cluster-randomized control trial that provided psychotherapy to perinatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. It was one...