Iron Deficiency Anemia and School Participation

Iron-deficiency anemia is among the world痴 most widespread health problems, especially for children, but it is rarely studied by economists. This paper evaluates the impact of a health intervention delivering iron supplementation and deworming drugs to 2-6 year old children through an existing pre-school network in the slums of Delhi, India. At baseline 69 percent of sample children were anemic and 30 percent had intestinal worm infections. Sample pre-schools were randomly divided into groups and gradually phased into treatment. Weight increased significantly among assisted children, and pre-school participation rates rose sharply by 5.8 percentage points - a reduction of one-fifth in school absenteeism - in the first five months of the program. Gains are largest in low socio-economic status areas. Year two estimates are similar, but two methodological problems ・sample attrition, and the non-random sorting of new child cohorts into treatment groups ・complicate interpretation of the later results.

The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on Marriage and Divorce

A growing number of less-developed countries have introduced conditional cash transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women. Economic models of the family suggest that these transfer programs may lead to marital turnover among program beneficiaries. We use data from the experimental evaluation of the PROGRESA program in Mexico to provide new evidence on the short-run impacts of targeted transfers on couples’ union dissolution and individuals’ new union formation decisions. We find that, although the overall share of women in union does not change as a result of the program, marital turnover increases. Intact families eligible for the transfers experienced a modest (0.32 percentage points) increase in separation rates, with most of the effect concentrated among young and relatively educated women households. In contrast, young single women with low educational attainment levels experienced a substantial increase in new union formation rates. The marital transition patterns are consistent with the workhorse economic model of the marriage market – individuals with the greatest prospects to start new unions and those who may become more attractive in the marriage market are more likely to transition out of existing relationships and form new ones.conditional cash transfers; welfare policy; marriage; divorce

Endowments, Coercion, and the Historical Containment of Education

Distinguishing the role of coercive labor and political institutions from the effects of economic inequality levels and populations’ ethno-linguistic compositions in explaining the diverging patterns of development across the Americas has remained a challenging task. This paper examines whether the incentives for elite groups to enforce coercive labor and political institutions, holding other factors constant, inhibited economic development by restricting the provision of public schooling. Using 19th-century micro data from municipalities in Puerto Rico, and exploiting variation in the suitability of coffee cultivation across regions and the timing of the nineteenth century coffee boom, we find that coffee-region local governments allocated more public resources to enforce coercive labor measures and repress revolutionary movements, as documented by greater expenditures targeted towards the enforcement of coercive contracts and the size of military and government-backed paramilitary forces. These local governments also allocated fewer resources towards the provision of primary schooling - a decline of 40 percent in the provision of public primary schools and a decline in literacy rates of 25 percent. These findings are consistent with models of factor price manipulation and political repression under elite-controlled non-democratic regimes, in which the returns to labor are depressed as a result of the extraction of rents from peasants’ wages and literacy-based voting rights are restricted through limited access to schooling.labor coercion; political institutions; geography; schooling

The Dynamic Effects of Information on Political Corruption: Theory and Evidence from Puerto Rico

Does the disclosure of information about corrupt activities induce a sustained reduction in corruption? We use publicly released routine audits of municipal governments in Puerto Rico to answer this question. We first develop a political agency model where voters re-elect incumbents based on their performance while in office. We show that, because voters cannot directly observe incumbents’ actions, an incumbent whose reputation improved in the previous term is likely to engage in more rent-seeking activities in a future term. Guided by this model, we use longitudinal data on audit results to examine the long-term consequences of providing information to voters on levels of political corruption. We find that municipal corruption levels in subsequent audits are on average the same in municipalities audited preceding the previous election and those not audited then. In spite of this, mayors in municipalities audited preceding the previous election have higher re-election rates, suggesting that audits enable voters to select more competent politicians. We conclude that short-term information dissemination policies do not necessarily align politicians’ long-term actions with voter preferences as politicians exploit their reputational gains by extracting more rents from office.corruption; information; political agency; dynamic incentives

The efficacy and safety of ketamine for depression in patients with cancer: A systematic review

Management of depression in the oncology population includes supportive psychotherapeutic interventions with or without psychotropic medication, which take time to demonstrate effectiveness. Fast-acting interventions, like ketamine, can provide a rapid antidepressant effect; however, there has been limited research on effects of ketamine among cancer patients. The objective of this review is to provide an overview of research on the efficacy and safety of ketamine on depression in patients with cancer. We reviewed the published literature in MEDLINE® (via PubMed®), EMBASE, and Scopus from 1 January 1982 to 20 October 2022. We screened the retrieved abstracts against inclusion criteria and conducted a full-text review of eligible studies. Following extraction of data from included studies, we used a framework analysis approach to summarize the evidence on using ketamine in patients with cancer. All 5 included studies were randomized clinical trials conducted in inpatient settings in China. In all included studies ketamine was administered intravenously. Three studies used only racemic ketamine, and two studies used both S-ketamine and racemic ketamine. All included studies reported ketamine a tolerable and effective drug to control depression symptoms. Included studies showed administration of sub-anesthesia ketamine significantly improves postoperative depression among patients with cancer. [Abstract copyright: © 2023 The Author(s).

The Timing of Welfare Payments and Intimate Partner Violence

I examine transfer schedules for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and find a causal relationship between the time directly after welfare payments and intimate partner violence against women. This study supports the hypothesis that the husband uses threats of violence as an instrument to gain control over the allocation of household resources, and suggests that the increased incidence in physical violence after welfare payments is associated with alcohol use. Additionally, I find that states that pay TANF recipients twice a month do not have this effect on threats of violence. This suggests that smaller, more frequent payments may reduce the husband’s incentive to use verbal violence as a bargaining tool. (JEL I38, J18, J12

Iron Deficiency Anemia and School Participation.

Abstract: Iron-deficiency anemia is among the world's most widespread health problems, especially for children, but it is rarely studied by economists. This paper evaluates the impact of a health intervention delivering iron supplementation and deworming drugs to 2-6 year old children through an existing pre-school network in the slums of Delhi, India. At baseline 69 percent of sample children were anemic and 30 percent had intestinal worm infections. Sample pre-schools were randomly divided into groups and gradually phased into treatment. Weight increased significantly among assisted children, and pre-school participation rates rose sharply by 5.8 percentage points -a reduction of one-fifth in school absenteeism -in the first five months of the program. Gains are largest in low socio-economic status areas. Year two estimates are similar, but two methodological problems -sample attrition, and the non-random sorting of new child cohorts into treatment groups -complicate interpretation of the later results

Species-specific activity of antibacterial drug combinations

International audienceThe spread of antimicrobial resistance has become a serious public health concern, making once treatable diseases deadly again and undermining breakthrough achievements of modern medicine 1,2. Drug combinations can aid in fighting multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacterial infections, yet, are largely unexplored and rarely used in clinics. To identify general principles for antibacterial drug combinations and understand their potential, we profiled ~3,000 dose-resolved combinations of antibiotics, human-targeted drugs and food additives in 6 strains from three Gram-negative pathogens, Escherichia coli, Salmonella Typhimurium and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Despite their phylogenetic relatedness, more than 70% of the detected drug-drug interactions are species-specific and 20% display strain specificity, revealing a large potential for narrow-spectrum therapies. Overall, antagonisms are more common than synergies and occur almost exclusively between drugs targeting different cellular processes, whereas synergies are more conserved and enriched in drugs targeting the same process. We elucidate mechanisms underlying this dichotomy and further use our resource to dissect the interactions of the food additive, vanillin. Finally, we demonstrate that several synergies are effective against MDR clinical isolates in vitro and during Galleria mellonella infections with one reverting resistance to the last-resort antibiotic, colistin

Can Conditional Cash Transfers compensate for a father’s absence?

This paper investigates how the departure of the father from the household, that results in his permanent absence, affects children’s school enrollment and work participation in rural Colombia. The results show that departure of the father decreases children’s school enrollment by around 5 percentage points and increases child labor by 3 percentage points. The paper exploits the roll-out of a conditional cash transfer program during the period of study and shows that it counteracts these adverse effects. This, and other pieces of evidence provided, strongly suggests that the channel through which the father’s departure affects children is through reducing the income of very poor households, which is tightening their liquidity constraints. It also highlights the important safety net role played by such welfare programs, in particular for disadvantaged households, which are unlikely to find formal or informal ways of insuring themselves against such vagaries