Child Labor and Schooling Response to Changes in Coca Production in Rural Peru Coca eradication and interdiction are the most common policies aimed at reducing the production and distribution of cocaine in the Andes, but little is known about their impact on households. This paper uses the shift in the production of coca leaves from Peru to Colombia in 1995 to analyze the indirect effects of th...

From the capability approach, child poverty is understood as the deprivation of basic capabilities and related achieved functionings. This paper examines multidimensional poverty among Afghan children using the Alkire and Foster method. The case of Afghanistan is particularly relevant as years of conflict aggravated by several severe droughts, political insecurity, bad governance and on going v...

This paper experimentally analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households with adolescent children in urban Brazil. Parents in our study were being paid large monthly transfers by the local government conditional upon their children attending school. We elicit parents’ incentivized choices between such conditional monthly payments and guaranteed, unconditional monthly payments of varying re...

Although divorces place millions of women from poor countries into hardship, we know little about this issue and its causes. This paper shows that the lack of children is a leading cause for divorce. We use twins and gender of firstborns as instruments to estimate the effect of the number of children and the existence of a son on mother’ marital statuses. The 2009 Vietnam Population Census show...

This paper introduces an index that facilitates the testing of differing matching theories based on the degree of overlap between a theoretically generated matching joint density and its empirical counterpart. The index is asymptotically Normal, consequently permitting inference. To demonstrate its use, the paper examines the effect the One Child Policy had on matching patterns in the marriage ...

We analyze the fertility and health effects resulting from the abolition of the Austrian baby bonus in January 1997. The abolition of the benefit was publicly announced about ten months in advance, creating the opportunity for prospective parents to (re-)schedule conceptions accordingly. We find robust evidence that, within the month before the abolition, about 8% more children were born as a r...

This paper introduces an index that facilitates the testing of differing matching theories based on the degree of overlap between a theoretically generated matching joint density and it’s empirical counterpart. The index is asymptotically Normally distributed, consequently permitting inference. To demonstrate its use, the paper examined the effect the One Child Policy had on matching patterns i...

The interaction between investment in children’s education and parental fertility is crucial in recent theories of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to modern economic growth. This paper contributes to the literature on the child quantity-quality trade-off with new countylevel evidence for Prussia in 1816, several decades before the demographic transition. We find a significant negative...

Increasing Rural Health Clinic Utilization with SMS Updates: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Uganda* This paper examines an alternative to monitoring staff at a public health clinic in rural Uganda. The program sent SMS updates regarding confirmed attendance of clinic staff and activities to randomly selected cell phone-owning households in the local community. A difference-in-differen...

A Portrait of Child Poverty in Germany This paper offers a descriptive portrait of income poverty among children in Germany between the early 1980s and 2001, with a focus on developments since unification in 1991. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are used to estimate poverty rates, rates of entry to and exit from poverty, and the duration of time spent in and out of poverty. The analys...