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We examine the impact of pollution from coal–fired power units on the anaemic status of children and women in India. The number of coal units in the district at the time of birth significantly increases the incidence of anaemia in young children as does in utero exposure. The number of coal units in the district also adversely affects the anaemic status of women, although the magnitude of impact is smaller than that for young children. The impacts are driven by the increase in PM2.5 pollution generated by coal-fired units. Our evidence points to anaemia as a significant health cost of coal-fired power generation in rapidly growing economies that use coal as a major source of fuel to meet increasing energy demands.

This paper examines how Nepal’s 1996-2006 civil conflict affected women’s decisions to engage in employment. Using three waves of Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, we employ a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of war on women’s employment decisions. Results indicate that as a result of the Maoist-led insurgency, women’s employment probabilities were substantially higher in 2001 and 2006 relative to the outbreak of war in 1996. These employment results also hold for self-employment decisions, and they hold for smaller sub-samples that condition on husband’s migration status and women’s status as widows or household heads. Numerous robustness checks of the main results provide compelling evidence that women’s likelihood of employment increased as a consequence of the conflict.

This paper examines how Nepal's 1996-2006 civil conflict affected women's decisions to engage in employment. Using three waves of the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, the authors employ a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of war on women's employment decisions. The results indicate that as a result of the Maoist-led insurgency, women's employment probabilities were substantially higher in 2001 and 2006 relative to the outbreak of war in 1996. These employment results also hold for self-employment decisions, and they hold for smaller sub-samples that condition on husband's migration status and women's status as widows or household heads. Numerous robustness checks of the difference-in-difference estimates based on alternative empirical methods provide compelling evidence that women's likelihood of employment increased as a consequence of the conflict.

This study examines how the 2008-2009 surges in international food and fuel prices and coinciding global financial crisis impacted the Philippine labor market, with a focus on gendered outcomes. A battery of descriptive statistics and probit regressions based on repeated cross sections of the Philippine Labor Force Survey indicate that both men and women experienced declines in the likelihood of employment, especially in 2008 and in manufacturing. While men's job losses were limited to wage employment, women lost job opportunities in wage- and self-employment, and they experienced increases in unpaid family work. Real wages fell for men and women, with much of the decline at the upper tails of the wage distribution. If one considers education as a proxy for skill, results suggest that unskilled workers were affected most adversely when the crisis began, especially in terms of employment losses, but as the crisis conditions wore on, skilled workers experienced negative impacts as well, especially in terms of real wage cuts.

This paper proposes a novel instrumental variable method for program evaluation that only requires a single cross-section of data on the spatial intensity of programs and outcomes. The instruments are derived from a simple theoretical model of government decision-making in which governments are responsive to the attributes of places and their populations, rather than to the attributes of individuals, in making allocation decisions across space, and have a social welfare function that is spatially weakly separable, that is, that the budgeting process is multi-stage with respect to administrative districts and sub-districts. The spatial instrumental variables model is then estimated and tested by GMM with a single cross-section of Indonesian census data. The results offer support to the identification strategy proposed.