A large literature uses parental evaluations of child health status to provide evidence on the socioeconomic determinants of health. If how parents perceive health questions differs by income or education level, then estimates of the socioeconomic gradient are likely to be biased and potentially misleading. In this paper we examine this issue. We directly compare child mental health evaluations...

Handedness, Time Use and Early Childhood Development We test if there is a differential in early child development by handedness, using a comprehensive range of measures covering, learning, social, cognitive and language skills, evaluated by both interviewer conducted tests and teacher assessments. We find robust evidence that left-handed children do significantly worse in nearly all measures o...

In belligerent countries, male-to-female sex ratios at birth increased during and shortly after the two world wars. These rises still defy explanation. Several causes have been suggested (but not tested) in the literature. Many of these causes are proximate in nature, refl ecting behavioral responses to the dramatically changed marriage market conditions for women and men that were induced by w...

This paper studies the quantity-quality trade-o¤model of fertility, under the assumption of hyperbolic discounting. It shows that the lack of self-control may play a di¤erent role in a developed economy and in a developing one. In the …rst case characterized by a positive investment in quality, the lack of self control tends to reduce fertility. In the second case, it is possible that the lack ...

This paper provides a microeconomic basis for simultaneously explaining two phenomena related to health insurance: camou age and ballooning. We use abortions in Switzerland as an illustrative example. First, a signi cant share of abortions is camou aged by contrived medical coding, and second, there is evidence of ballooning in that jurisdictions with strict enforcement of abortion regulation t...

This study focuses on the estimation of household demand for immunization as well as its technological effect on the survival probability of a child in rural India. Careful attention is paid to the consequences of parental selection and heterogeneity on survival technology. The results suggest that child mortality is negatively related to the likelihood of purchasing vaccination, but imperfect ...

It’s a Boy! Women and Non-Monetary Benefits from a Son in India Son preference is widespread in a number of developing countries. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women may contribute to the persistence of this phenomenon because they derive substantial long-run non-monetary benefits from giving birth to a son in the form of an improvement in their intra-household position. This paper tests thi...

Raising Juveniles This paper investigates how families make decisions about the education of juveniles. The decision problem is analyzed in three variations: a ‘decentralized’ scheme, in which the parents control the purse-strings, but the children dispose of their time as they see fit; a ‘hierarchical’ scheme, in which the parents can enforce a particular level of schooling by employing a moni...

The Impact of Relative Cohort Size on U.S. Fertility, 1913–2001 This paper tests for the long-term and short-term relationships between fertility and relative cohort size for the United States using the annual time series data between 1913 and 2001. An error correction model, imbedded with the cointegration theory, is coupled with the general impulse response function. Empirical evidence on rel...

Multivariate Decomposition for Hazard Rate Models We develop a regression decomposition technique for hazard rate models, where the difference in observed rates is decomposed into components attributable to group differences in characteristics and group differences in effects. The baseline hazard is specified using a piecewise constant exponential model, which leads to convenient estimation bas...