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This paper investigates the sensitivity of the intergenerational transmission of health to changes in the socioeconomic and public health environment into which children are born using individual survey data on 2.24 million children born to 600,000 mothers during the period 1970 to 2000 in 38 developing countries merged by country and cohort with macroeconomic data. We find that children are more likely to bear the penalty exerted by poor maternal health if they are conceived or born in adverse socioeconomic conditions. Equivalently, shocks to the child's birth environment are more damaging of children born to women with weaker health at birth.

This study examines the association of unemployment variation with intimate partner violence using representative data from thirty-one developing countries, from 2005 to 2016. It finds that a 1 percent increase in the male unemployment rate is associated with an increase in the incidence of physical violence against women by 0.50 percentage points, or 2.75 percent. This is consistent with financial and psychological stress generated by unemployment. Female unemployment rates have the opposite effect, a 1 percent decrease being associated with an increase in the probability of victimization of 0.52 percentage points, or 2.87 percent. That an improvement in women's employment opportunities is associated with increased violence is consistent with male backlash. The study finds that this pattern of behaviors emerges entirely from countries in which women have more limited access to divorce than men.

This paper studies the causal effect of maternal and paternal unemployment on child health in China, analyzing panel data for the period 1997-2004, when the country underwent economic reforms leading to massive layoffs. Using a FE-IV strategy, we find that paternal unemployment reduces child health, while maternal unemployment has beneficial child health impacts. Analysis of channels shows that paternal and maternal unemployment have different effects on income, time use, and children's diets. Though many estimates are imprecise, a key finding is that paternal unemployment significantly reduces children's fat intake and dietary diversity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence on the causal effect of parental unemployment on the nutrient intake of children aged 0-17. In all, our estimates are consistent with the notion that traditional gender roles can explain why mothers' and fathers' unemployment affect child health differently. Keywords Child Health • Unemployment • Nutrition • China JEL Classification I12 • J13 • J69 • O15

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

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We examine the effect of domestic violence on child mortality using Demographic and Health Surveys from thirty‐two developing countries. We first examine conditional associations between violence faced by the mother and child mortality after controlling for observable confounders. Children of (ever) physically victimized mothers are 0.4, 0.7, and 1.0 pp more likely to die within thirty days, a year, and five years of being born. We find similar associations when examining violence experienced in the last twelve months, although these are no longer statistically significant. The association is statistically significant, and larger, if the mother experiences violence in the last twelve months often, rather than sometimes. Violence is significantly associated with pregnancy loss, suggesting the true effect on mortality is larger than estimates based on live‐births would suggest. We investigate robustness of associations to omitted variable bias, assessing the role of selection on unobservables to estimate lower bounds on the true effect. These continue to indicate economically meaningful positive effects, suggesting selection on unobservables would need to be 2.4–3 times that of selection on observables to nullify the estimated effect. We provide evidence that maternal smoking and breastfeeding practices are mediators in the relationship between domestic violence and child mortality.