Christine Valente

The puzzle of Muslim advantage in child survival in India.

The socioeconomic status of Indian Muslims is, on average, considerably lower than that of upper-caste Hindus. Muslims nevertheless exhibit substantially higher child survival rates, and have done for decades. This paper analyses this seeming puzzle. A decomposition of the survival differential confirms that some compositional effects favour Muslims but that, overall, differences in characteristics and especially the Muslim deficit in parental education predict a Muslim disadvantage. The results of this study contribute to a recent literature that debates the importance of socioeconomic status (SES) in determining health and survival. They augment a growing literature on the role of religion or culture as encapsulating important unobservable behaviours or endowments that influence health, indeed, enough to reverse the SES gradient that is commonly observed.

Civil conflict, gender-specific fetal loss, and selection: a new test of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis.

A sizeable economics literature explores the effect of prenatal shocks on later health or socioeconomic status. Work in other disciplines, following the seminal contribution of Trivers and Willard (1973), suggests that prenatal shocks may increase fetal loss and reduce the number of boys relative to girls at birth. This has been largely ignored in the economics literature and could affect the interpretation of estimates of the effect of prenatal shocks and that of gender in other applied economics contexts. This paper analyzes the effect of in utero exposure to a shock - civil conflict in Nepal - on (i) fetal loss, and (ii) gender and (iii) health at birth. Maternal fixed effects estimates show that exposed pregnancies are more likely to result in a miscarriage and in a female birth, but exposed newborns are neither smaller nor more subject to neonatal mortality.

What Did the Maoists Ever Do for Us? Education and Marriage of Women Exposed to Civil Conflict in Nepal

Between 1996 and 2006, Nepal experienced violent civil conflict as a consequence of a Maoist insurgency, which many argue also brought about an increase in female empowerment. This paper exploits within and between-district variation in the intensity of violence to estimate the impact of conflict intensity on two key areas of the life of women in Nepal, namely education and marriage. Overall conflict intensity had a small, positive effect on female educational attainment, whereas abductions by Maoists had the reverse effect. Male schooling was not significantly affected by either conflict measure. Conflict intensity and Maoist abductions during school age both increased the probability of early female marriage, but exposure to conflict during marriageable age does not appear to have affected womens long-term marriage probability.

Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs

due to the favourable economic environment and plentiful finance. I doubt it would be possible in current conditions for a defaulting emerging market to continue to receive funds after default whilst at the same time being able to pursue state-led social and economic strategies. Indeed, an interesting question that strikes one when reading this book at the present economic conjuncture is the extent to which the current financial crisis might change some of these conclusions. For what we are now facing is a crisis in developed finance and the models that underlie many of the neoliberal policies pursued throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Whether this will allow countries a more pluralistic response to crisis in the future remains to be seen. That having been said, however, this book is a very rich and useful source of information and analysis of the role of both foreign and domestic influences in the outcomes that follow financial crisis.