Exploiting DHS data from 235 regions in 29 Sub-Saharan Africa countries, we find that the combination of low levels of malnutrition together with dramatically high rates of mortality, encountered in Kenya's Lake Victoria territory, is unique for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper explores the causes...

With fortuitously timed data - collected before, during and after a major macro-financial crisis in Bulgaria - we revisit several hypotheses in the economics and nutritional literature related to the tendency of households to smooth their nutritional status over time. We explore the dietary...

This paper studies the impact of the 1999 Colombian Earthquake on child nutrition and schooling. The identification strategy combines household survey data with event data on the timing and location of the earthquake, exploiting the exogenous exposure of children to the shock. The paper uniquely...

This paper analyzes urban-rural disparities of China's child health and nutritional status using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data from 1989 to 2006. We investigate degrees of health and nutritional disparities between urban and rural children in China as well as how such disparities...

In order to explain the substantial recent increases in obesity rates in the United States, we consider the effect of falling food prices in the context of a model involving endogenous body weight norms and an explicit, empirically grounded description of human metabolism. Unlike previous...

Basic human rights recognize the intrinsic value of freedom, only not for the value of freedom itself, but also for its instrumental role enabling an individual to choose a bundle of commodities and wellbeing. The role of food, a basic necessity of life, in fostering freedom is important, to say...

Using data from the 1995 Malawi Financial Markets and Food Security Survey, this study seeks to discover if women’s relative control over household resources or intra-household bargaining power in rural Malawi, gauged by their access to microcredit, plays a role in children’s food security,...

While the nutritional status of individuals became in recent years a central issue in development economics, relevant and reliable data are often scarce. Available living standard surveys provide a wide set of information about household food consumption and calorie intake. Yet, due to the focus...

This paper uses Propensity Score Matching to investigate the causal effect of breastfeeding on children's cognitive development. There is a strong association between breastfeeding and cognitive outcomes; however, it is notoriously difficult to establish whether this is causal, or whether it...

This article re-examines the food consumption of working class households in 1904 and compares the nutritional content of these diets with modern measures of adequacy. We find a fairly steep gradient of nutritional attainment relative to economic class, with high levels of vitamin and mineral...