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Vietnam's 1993 Land Law created a land market by granting households land-use rights which could be exchanged, leased, and mortgaged. Using a matched household sample from Vietnam's 2004 and 2008 Household Living Standards Survey, this study analyzes whether land titling for women led to improvements in child health and education. Results indicate that female-only held land-use rights decreased the incidence of illness among children, increased their health insurance coverage, raised school enrollment, and reallocated household expenditures toward food and away from alcohol and tobacco. These effects were almost all stronger than those of male-only or jointly-held land-use rights.

This study addresses the question of how increasing competitive forces from India's trade liberalization have affected the wages of male and female workers. Neoclassical theory implies that costly discrimination against female workers should diminish over time with increased competition (Becker 1971). We incorporate this idea into a theoretical model of competition and industry concentration in which the net effect of international trade on the gender wage gap could be positive or negative depending on changes in market parameters and the discrimination coefficient. Our study tests the theoretical model using repeated cross sections of India's NSSO household survey data merged with trade and production data from 1983 to 2004. We employ OLS and Fixed Effects techniques at the industry level to estimate the relationship between the male-female residual wage gap and measures of domestic concentration and international trade competition. Results indicate that increasing openness to trade is associated with a widening in the wage gap in India's concentrated manufacturing industries.

This paper studies early childhood health in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, focusing on inequalities in anthropometric outcomes by religious adherence. India and Nepal have Hindu majorities, while Bangladesh is predominantly Muslim. Results confirm a relative Muslim advantage for children less than 12 months of age in height-forage and weight-forage z scores primarily in India, possibly reflecting better nutritional intake from a non-vegetarian diet and the positive health endowment of Muslim women who tend to be taller than Hindu women. However this advantage disappears beyond 12 months of age, at which point Hindu children in all three countries are found to have significantly better anthropometric outcomes than Muslim children. We report tests that rule out mortality selection and undertake falsification and robustness exercises to affirm these findings.

Vietnam's 1993 Land Law created a land market by granting households tradable landuse rights. This study uses mixed methods to analyze whether increased land titling led to improvements in household economic security and whether land titles in women's and men's names had different effects. Using a matched sample of households from Vietnam's 2004 and Household Living Standards Survey, we find that land-use rights held exclusively by women or jointly by couples result in beneficial effects that include increased household expenditures, greater women's self-employment, and lower household vulnerability to poverty. Results from interviews conducted in Vietnam support these conclusions by indicating that women with sole or joint ownership of land enjoyed greater well-being and higher status.

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Orlic, and Uros Randelovic for excellent research assistance. This project was made possible by a Provost Research Grant and funds from the Brazil Initiative at Brandeis University. The usual disclaimer applies. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Children in the Indian subcontinent are among the most undernourished in the world. In Bangladesh and Nepal, for example, over 40 percent of children less than five years of age suffer from chronic undernourishment; in India, 45 percent of all children under age three were stunted according to the most recent Demographic and Health Survey. 1 The rates of stunting (low height-for-age) and undernourishment (low weight-for-age) in all three countries are higher than those in many countries of sub-Saharan Africa that have lower levels of per capita income and higher rates of infant and child mortality (Deaton and Drèze 2009; Jayachandran and Pande 2015). There is some evidence, albeit inconsistent, that these patterns persisted during the 1990s and early 2000s, at a time when both India and Bangladesh experienced significant economic growth and made rapid progress in reducing poverty. Even among affluent Indian households, a substantial proportion of children are undernourished by most anthropometric indicators (Deaton and Drèze 2009).We investigate the puzzle of child undernourishment in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal by comparing differences in child health by religious affiliation (Hindu or Muslim). The religious affiliation of a child's family provides information on the likely dietary restrictions encountered by a child in his or her early growing years, on the child's exposure to fasting in utero during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and on possible differences between religions in women's autonomy and control over household resources. All of these factors may contribute to the high rate of stunting and wasting among children in these countries. Since one is born into one's religious identity, and marriage in these regions is restricted to one's caste and faith, 2 these three countries provide an especially pertinent context in which to analyze the causes of inequality in child health by religious identity. 4 4 0 r e l i g i o n a n d h e a lt h i n e a r ly C h i l d h o o dWe focus on children from birth to five years of age. The health of children at these young ages is critically important, since negative health shocks in this period can have large, long-lasting effects extending into adulthood (Currie and Vogl 2013). Children in developing countries are likely to be especially vulnerable to early health shocks given the prevalence of insults to health (nutritional, environmental, and toxic) and widespread adherence to behavior that may have harmful effects on children's health, such as fasting during pregnancy. Negative health shocks to children in developing countries have only recently begun to receive attention in the economics literature (Jayachandran 2009; Maccini and Yang 2009; Almond and Mazumder 2011; Currie and Vogl 2013; Brainerd and Menon 2014).We use a number of datasets to assess inequalities in child health by religion. Our main analysis uses several recent rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for India, Bangladesh, and Nepal to examine differences in child anthropometric meas...