The main questions of this thesis are how a period of in utero malnutrition can
impact the health of young children and their later development, and how job
promotions can affect health.
In the first chapter I analyse to what extent the South-East Asian financial
crisis affected the height of Indonesian children who had in utero exposure to the
crisis. I find that they are significantly shorter than children who were exposed at
later ages. There is a large difference in effect for urban and rural children. This
finding helps attribute the detrimental health effects to the crisis and not other
events which occurred during the period of analysis.
The second chapter exploits the exogenous shock of the crisis to analyse how
early childhood height causes later cognitive development. I argue that this question should be analysed using instrumental variables. The results show a large
and significant effect of early childhood height on cognitive ability and the use of
instrumental variables changes the results significantly compared to OLS with or
without fixed effects.
Lastly, I analyse how on the job promotions of British civil servants affect health.
In a cross-section, the direction of causality is almost certainly two-way. I argue
that the use of individual fixed effects will alleviate this concern. The results show
a large, positive effect of a job promotion on health in the subsequent survey phase
