This study assesses the causal effect of child marriage on infant mortality. Using age discontinuities in exposure to a law that raised the legal age of marriage for women in Ethiopia, the study estimates that a 1-year delay in a woman’s age at cohabitation during her teenage years reduces the probability of her first-born child dying during infancy by 3.8 percentage points. This impact is closely linked to the effect of delaying cohabitation on women’s age at first birth.

How is trust in vaccines affected by exposure to Soviet communism? Using individual level evidence on vaccine trust with regards to its efficiency and safety from a long list of world countries, we document that exposure to Soviet communism reduces trust in vaccination. We show that exposure to socio-political regimes can explain limited trust in vaccines, which is explained by weak trust in government, medical personnel, medical advice from doctors as well as in people from the neighbourhood. These results suggest that roots of vaccine distrust lie in a wider distrust in public and state institutions resulting from the exposure to Soviet communism.

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This article assesses the impact of the Northern Ghana Millennium Village Project. We estimate project effects on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) indicators using a difference-in-difference approach applied to matched villages and households using a sub-classification of the propensity score. The project improved some MDG indicators but, with few exceptions, impacts were small and core welfare indicators, such as monetary poverty, undernutrition and child mortality, remained unaffected. We found no spillover effects of the project to neighbouring areas and no displacements of development expenditure by local government and NGOs. We assessed the cost-effectiveness of the intervention and concluded that MVP did not produce the expected cost-saving synergies. We attribute the lack of impact to poor project design, redundancy of the interventions, and excessively high expectations.