Experimental Approaches in Migration Studies The decision of whether or not to migrate has far-reaching consequences for the lives of individuals and their families. But the very nature of this choice makes identifying the impacts of migration difficult, since it is hard to measure a credible counterfactual of what the person and their household would have been doing had migration not occurred....

Copper mining is one of the largest economic activities in Zambia, comprising close to ten percent of GDP. Between 2003 and 2008, the price of copper increased by over 400 percent. In response, copper production in Zambia increased by 70 percent and employment in copper mining increased by nearly 200 percent. This paper examines the effect of this economic shock on sexual behavior and the sprea...

I use the experience of China’s One Child Policy to examine how fertility restrictions affect economic and social outcomes over the lifetime. The One Child Policy imposed a birth quota and heavy penalties for “out-of-plan” births. Using variation in the fertility penalties across provinces over time, I examine how fertility restrictions imposed early in the lives of individuals affected their e...

This paper examines the impact of women’s property inheritance rights on their educational attainment. Using exogenous variation created by femalefriendly state level reforms to the inheritance law in India, I find that educational attainment of women who were of primary school-going age at the time of reform increased by an average of 0.5 years in reforming relative to non-reforming states. Th...

This paper examines the role of parents in helping children secure employment in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children’s employment with parent’s usefulness in job search. I find that fathers serve as useful network connections to their sons (and not daughters), but that mothers do not seem to be useful network connections for any of...

The End of Destitution The paper presents a statistical generalisation, to working families in the whole of Britain, of Rowntree’s finding that absolute poverty declined dramatically in York between 1899 and 1936. We use poverty lines devised by contemporary social investigators and two relatively newly-discovered data sets. We estimate an almost complete elimination of absolute poverty among w...

The theory of economic growth takes little notice of what is happening on the demand side of the markets so that ever more goods and services can be sold. In order to make progress, this paper revives a classical notion in economics, the concept of wants, and re-casts it in terms of a behavioral theory. Hypotheses are discussed concerning the wants people pursue, the changes in these wants, and...

In 2003 the Government of Ghana established a National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to improve health care access for Ghanaians and eventually replace the cashand-carry system. This study evaluates the NHIS to determine whether it is fulfi lling its purpose in the context of the Millennium Development Goals #4 and #5 which deal with the health of women and children. We use Propensity Score Ma...

Despite a growing literature documenting strong linkages between income and health, there remains little understanding of how economic factors shape disease outcomes in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Using individual level data from nineteen sub-Saharan African countries, we show that negative income shocks can lead to substantial increases in HIV prevalence. We match data on individuals’ HIV status fr...

Funeral insurance has existed at least since antiquity, and it remains popular in many parts of Africa today. Yet the study of funeral insurance as a distinct form of insurance has hitherto been neglected. This paper presents a model in which funeral insurance combines regular life insurance with a restriction on how the payout is spent. The model predicts that there is an intermediate range of...