Health and education are not only beneficial in themselves, but they can be viewed as investments in human capital which lead to a higher future standard of living. The people of Africa experience lower levels of both health and education than prevail in other regions of the world, which...

We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children. We estimate production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills as a function of...

The demographic transition changes the age composition of a population, affecting resource allocations at the household and aggregate level. If age profiles of income, consumption, savings and investments were stable and estimable for the entire population, they might suggest how the demographic...

This paper uses data from Matlab, Bangladesh to examine the characteristics of female-headed households and estimate the impact of female-headship on children's schooling. Female householdheads in Matlab fall into two broad groups: widows and married women, most of whom are wives of migrants....

Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and...

The associations between fertility and outcomes in the family and society have been treated as causal, but this is inaccurate if fertility is a choice coordinated by families with other life-cycle decisions, including labour supply of mothers and children, child human capital, and savings....

Regressions across countries from 1960 to 1995 are discussed to document African poor performance in terms of infant and child mortality, life expectation, and school enrollment rates, controlling for national income, women's and men's schooling, and urbanization. It is concluded that...

Simon Szreter’s book Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 argues that social and economic class fails to explain the cross-sectional differences in marital fertility as reported in the 1911 census of England and Wales. Szreter’s conclusion made the book immediately influential,...