In this talk, I’ll be discussing the relationship with child stunting of two practices that are common in the local context.  The first is son-biased fertility stopping behaviour, where parents commonly add to their family until they reach the desired number of sons.  This increases the chances that later-born children are stunted, unless the child is a first born son.  Prenatal inputs also tend to increase if a family does not yet have a son.  The second practice that we consider is the impact of exposure to mild in-utero nutritional disruptions due to fasting.

Theresa Chaudhry is Professor of Economics at the Lahore School of Economics and Editor of the Lahore Journal of Economics.   She completed her PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland in College Park in 2005.  Her research broadly can be characterised as applied microeconomics, but primarily focusses on the productivity of firms and household dynamics affecting child health and education.