Essays in development and health economics

This dissertation consists of three essays in applied economics. They address two main topics: (1) the consequences of orphanhood on labor market and fertility outcomes of young adults, and (2) the childhood determinants of adult height in populations.;The first chapter, which lies in the field of development economics, is concerned with the impact of orphanhood on patterns of labor market attachment in young adults. I make use of the Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies Database, a large socio-demographic longitudinal study in Northeast KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. I focus on young adults aged 18 to 25, and I find that they are more likely to be inactive (not enrolled in school, unemployed and not seeking work). Exploiting the longitudinal aspect of the data set, I also find that parental death increases the chances of becoming inactive both for maternal orphans and for those in poorer households. Orphans with more education prior to parental death have better labor market outcomes in that they are more likely to become employed following parental demise. This suggests that the impact of orphanhood on labor market outcomes is heterogeneous, meaning that parental death interacts with other factors in determining orphans' subsequent labor market status. To make sense of these results, I present a model of labor market participation that is consistent with my findings and with stylized facts of the South African labor market.;The second chapter also studies the consequences of orphaning in young adults, but from a different perspective. First, it uses information from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a longitudinal study in Cape Town, to complement the results that are obtained from the less densely populated surveillance area analyzed in Chapter 1. Second, in doing so, I am able to explore a broader set of outcomes, including fertility patterns as well as information about earnings and hours worked. Third, I make use of a richer array of covariates that may also affect subsequent outcomes in young adulthood. I find that male orphans are more likely to be working than non-orphans, and that female orphans are more likely to become teenage mothers than their non-orphaned counterparts. To conclude, I compare these findings with those presented in the previous chapter and with findings in the existing literature in the consequences of parental death.;The last chapter, which is joint work with Angus Deaton and Climent Quintana-Domeque, investigates the childhood determinants of adult height, studying the roles of income and disease. Using cohort data from European countries and the United States, we find an inverse relationship between postneonatal (one month to one year) mortality, interpreted as a measure of the disease and nutritional burden in childhood, and the mean height of those children as adults. We present a model of adult heights in which selection and scarring play a crucial role. In this model, nutrition and disease early in life not only determine child mortality but also affects adult height and late-life disease in survivors. The model predicts that sufficiently high child mortality may select survivors that are tall as adults, and in this sense, the selection effect on survivors can overcome the negative effects of scarring from disease early in life. We present findings from poor countries with high mortality rates that are supportive of this hypothesis.