In school age children and adolescents, anemia might cause lower cognitive function and attention span, which in turn could diminish human capital accumulation. As children born in low-income households are more likely to be anemic, this may prevent many individuals from overcoming the intergenerational poverty traps. In this paper, we used data from the Mexican National Health and Nutrition Survey 2012 and focused on a sample of adolescents between 12 and 19 years of age to study the relationship between attending school without delay—our proxy for school performance—and anemia. We found a statistically significant association between the two variables. If this relationship is causal, the economic burden linked to the loss of school years could well exceed the costs associated with programs aimed at reducing the prevalence of anemia in vulnerable populations. Our results provide additional support to the existing literature on anemia as a significant barrier to school achievement.

Games that appear to be independent, involving none of the same players, may be related by emotions of reciprocity between the members of the same groups. In the real world, individuals are members of groups and want to reward or punish those groups whose members have been kind or unkind to members of their own. In this paper, we extend Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger’s model of sequential reciprocity (Games Econ Behav 47(2):268–298, 2004) to groups of individuals and define a new “sequential group reciprocity equilibrium” for which we prove its existence. We study the case of two games with two players in each game, where each player belongs to the same group as a player in the other game. We show that when the payoffs of one game are much higher than the payoffs of the other, the outcome of the game with higher payoffs determines the outcome of the other game. We also find that when the payoffs are very asymmetric, the outcome where the sum of the payoffs is maximized is a sequential group reciprocity equilibrium.