The impact of participation in Head Start is investigated using a national sample of children. Comparisons are drawn between siblings to control for selection. Head Start is associated with large and significant gains in test scores among both whites and African-Americans. However, among African-Americans, these gains are quickly lost. Head Start significantly reduces the probability that a white child will repeat a grade, but it has no effect on grade repetition among African-American children. Both whites and African-Americans who attend Head Start, or other preschools, gain greater access to preventive health services.

The relationship between economic development and health has received far less attention than the relationship between development and schooling. However, recent studies indicate that better health is associated with improved labor market outcomes, particularly in low-income settings. Difficulties in disentangling the causal mechanisms underlying these associations are discussed, highlighting the role of behaviors and measurement of health. The empirical literature is reviewed, and implications of results for the functioning of markets are drawn out. The discussion includes an evaluation of the empirical evidence in support of the nutrition (health) efficiency wage hypothesis: we conclude that it is thin.

The farm household model has played a central role in improving the understanding of small-scale agricultural households and non-farm enterprises. Under the assumptions that all current and future markets exist and that farmers treat all prices as given, the model simplifies households' simultaneous production and consumption decisions into a recursive form in which production can be treated as independent of preferences of household members. These assumptions, which are the foundation of a large literature in labor and development, have been tested and not rejected in several important studies including Benjamin (1992). Using multiple waves of longitudinal survey data from Central Java, Indonesia, this paper tests a key prediction of the recursive model: demand for farm labor is unrelated to the demographic composition of the farm household. The prediction is unambiguously rejected. The rejection cannot be explained by contamination due to unobserved heterogeneity that is fixed at the farm level, local area shocks or farm-specific shocks that affect changes in household composition and farm labor demand. We conclude that the recursive form of the farm household model is not consistent with the data. Developing empirically tractable models of farm households when markets are incomplete remains an important challenge.

A concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes the notion that there are groups of goods (adult goods) that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics (the numbers or ages of children).That there exist adult goods demographically separable from children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of Rothbarth's method for measuring child costs. We propose two different methods for testing demographic separability and present results from a 1981 survey of Spain. The econometric evidence is in fair agreement with the theoretical presuppositions.

CHILDREN;POVERTY

Specially collected data on adults in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are used to provide evidence on the longer-term effects of Head Start, an early intervention program for poor preschool-age children. Whites who attended Head Start are, relative to their siblings who did not, significantly more likely to complete high school, attend college, and possibly have higher earnings in their early twenties. African-Americans who participated in Head Start are less likely to have been booked or charged with a crime. There is some evidence of positive spillovers from older Head Start children to their younger siblings.

A concept of demographic separability is proposed that formalizes the notion that there are groups of goods (adult goods) that have little or no relationship to specific classes of household demographics (the numbers or ages of children).That there exist adult goods demographically separable from children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the validity of Rothbarth's method for measuring child costs. We propose two different methods for testing demographic separability and present results from a 1981 survey of Spain. The econometric evidence is in fair agreement with the theoretical presuppositions.

Whereas attitudes toward risk play an important role in many decisions over the life course, factors that affect those attitudes are not fully understood. Using longitudinal survey data collected in Mexico before and during the Mexican war on drugs, we investigate how risk attitudes change with variation in insecurity and uncertainty brought on by unprecedented changes in local-area violent crime. Exploiting the fact that the timing, virulence, and spatial distribution of changes in violent crime were unanticipated, we establish there is a rise in risk aversion spread across the entire local population as local-area violent crime increases.