The paper evaluates an Indian maternal conditional cash transfer scheme. Launched in 2005, the program gives women cash transfers for receiving maternal and child health care services. This paper uses data from India’s District Level Household Survey to evaluate the program’s impact. Results indicate that the program had a limited overall effect: relative to the broader population, the targeted...

Several contributions have already pointed out that initial wealth inequalities do persist in the long run in the Ramsey model with heterogenous agents. We show that this result is not robust to the introduction of endogenous fertility. Our argument builds on the Barro-Becker (1989) seminal model extended to allow for heterogenous agents with different capital endowments. Strikingly enough, ind...

In 2000 Census microdata, various outcomes of second-generation immigrants are related to their parents' age at arrival to the United States, and in particular whether that age fell within the "critical period" of language acquisition. We interpret this as an effect of the parent's English-language skills and construct an instrumental variable for parental English proficiency. Estimates of the ...

In this paper, a variety of potentially explanatory indicators for child labor and school attendance in Zambia is scrutinized. By analyzing the results from a bivariate probit model, the arising doubt with regard to the income sensitivity of the child labor choice is confirmed. Among other factors, community effects influence the child labor and schooling choice. Based on the results, sensitiza...

Using the most comprehensive developing country dataset ever compiled on air and water pollution and environmental regulations, the paper assesses India’s environmental regulations with a difference-in-differences design. The air pollution regulations are associated with substantial improvements in air quality. The most successful air regulation resulted in a modest but statistically insignific...

I compare the predictions of two types of dynastic models for the persistence of wealth across generations: models that focus on uninsurable risk and intergenerational consumption smoothing but abstract from the fertility decision, such as Loury and Laitner, and models without risk that focus on the fertility decision, such as Becker and Barro. I show that when both uninsurable risk and fertili...

This paper investigates how high-speed home Internet has impacted married women’s labor force participation. I estimate the net effect of individual Internet usage on labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy which exploits cross-state variation in supply-side constraints to residential broadband Internet access. Results indicate that married women who use the Internet are more like...

Intergenerational Education Transmission: Neighborhood Quality and/or Parents’ Involvement? We develop a model that analyzes the impact of residential neighborhood and parents’ involvement in education on children’s educational attainment and test it using the UK National Child Development Study. We find that the better the quality of the neighborhood, the higher the parents’ involvement in chi...

A fundamental puzzle about human behavior is the low level of household investment in preventive health inputs. We conducted a field experiment testing advertising devices designed to increase demand for a life-saving health technology characterized by low uptake. Our results reveal highly elastic demand with respect to factors that lie outside of standard consumer demand models of health behav...

We estimate the effect of motherhood on wages using matching. We distinguish between net and direct effects. The net effect includes the total wage costs, whereas the direct represents the causal effect. Since covariates are likely affected by motherhood, the latter effect is not immediately uncovered. We therefore implement two strategies: First, we confine the analysis to consider sector-spec...