AbstractHealth, and in turn income and welfare, depend on access to safe drinking water. Although the majority of rural households worldwide obtain drinking water from community water sources, there is limited evidence about how effectively these sources provide safe drinking water. This study combines a randomized experiment with water quality testing to evaluate the impact of a program that provides

AbstractWhen and for what reason do governments choose to monopolize violence and consolidate power? Theory suggests three channels: when the government has coercive power against the opposition, if it shifts the distribution of power in its favor, and when contingent spoils are large. Using international oil price shocks and a novel dataset on oil-producing local government areas, this article examines

AbstractThis paper examines whether agricultural insurance can boost investment by small scale farmers in West Africa. It is based on a randomized evaluation designed to analyze the impacts of index insurance for cotton farmers in Burkina Faso. No impact of insurance was found on cotton, but, consistent with microeconomic theory, significant spillover impacts on investment in other agricultural activities

What is the best way to improve access and learning outcomes for girls? This review brings together evidence from 267 educational interventions in 54 low- and middle-income countries – regardless of whether the interventions specifically target girls – and identifies their impacts on girls. To improve access and learning, general interventions deliver average gains for girls that are comparable to

This paper uses a randomized controlled experiment in which farmers trained on a new rice cultivation method teach two other farmers. The results show that the intervention increases yields and farm profits among treated farmers. Teacher-trainees are effective at spreading knowledge and inducing adoption relative to just training. Incentivizing teacher-trainees improves knowledge transmission but not

The Gini coefficient of labor earnings in Brazil fell by nearly a fifth between 1995 and 2012, from 0.50 to 0.41. The decline in other measures of earnings inequality was even larger, with the 90-10 percentile ratio falling by almost 40 percent. Applying micro-econometric decomposition techniques, this study parses out the proximate determinants of this substantial reduction in earnings inequality

Zoning laws that restrict rural land to agricultural production pose an important institutional barrier to industrial development. We study the effects of the Industrial Areas (IA) program in Karnataka, India, which rezoned agricultural land for industrial use, but without the economic incentives common with other place-based policies. We find that the program caused a large increase in firm creation

Low levels of investment into modern technologies, and limited use of measures that have low monetary cost but the potential for high yields, are often regarded as obstacles to further agricultural development. This paper investigates farmers’ demand for one such measure, namely agricultural advisory services. These have modest (most frequently zero) monetary user cost but, according to some recent

AbstractThis article offers an overview of some key conceptual aspects associated with the rise of global value chains (GVCs). It outlines a series of alternative interpretations and definitions of what the rise of GVCs entails, and it traces the implications of these alternative conceptualizations for the measurement of the phenomenon, as well as for elucidating the key determinants and implications

AbstractThe detrimental effects of natural disasters on human capital during childhood are well-documented. However, little is known about whether, and to what extent, these impacts can be mitigated in the long term. This study analyzes whether a school infrastructure program can mitigate the adverse effects of extreme weather shocks on long-term children's education and labor market outcomes. This

Economists often default to the assumption that cash is always preferable to an in-kind transfer. Do beneficiaries feel the same way? This paper addresses this issue using longitudinal household data from Ethiopia, where a large-scale social safety net intervention (PSNP) operates. Even though most payments are made in cash, and even though the (temporal) transaction costs associated with food payments

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence about their effects. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification of some individuals with regard to their poverty status. Using a novel survey for Senegal

This article documents a positive and sizable correlation between the location of historical Christian missions and the allocation of present-day World Bank aid at the grid-cell level in Africa. The correlation is robust to an extensive set of geographical and historical control variables that predict settlement of missions. The study finds no correlation with aid effectiveness, as measured by project

AbstractThis article sheds light on the impact on household investment efficiency of a social norm that a man should not earn less than his wife. The experiment distinguishes this impact from that of spouses’ desire for control over household resources. Both husbands and wives are found to sacrifice household income (efficiency) for greater control; but, consistent with this social norm, husbands alone

The challenges associated with poverty measurement with a cardinal variable have received due attention during the last four decades, but there is a dearth of literature studying how to meaningfully assess poverty with an ordinal variable. This paper first proposes a class of simple, intuitive and policy-relevant poverty measures for ordinal variables. These measures are sensitive to depth of deprivations

The Global Findex database is the world's most comprehensive set of data on how people make payments, save money, borrow and manage risk. Launched in 2011, it includes more than 100 financial inclu...

This study uses a choice experiment among 2,000 workers in Bangladesh to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for job attributes: a contract, termination notice, working hours, paid leave, and a pension fund. Using a stated preference method allows calculation of WTP for benefits in this setting, despite the lack of data on worker transitions, and the fact that many workers are self-employed, which makes

This article investigates the causal relationship between women’s schooling and fertility by exploiting variation generated by the removal of school fees in Ethiopia. The increase in schooling caused by the reform is identified using both geographic variation in the intensity of its impact and temporal variation generated by the timing of the implementation. The model finds that the removal of school

AbstractBusiness training programs in low-income settings have shown only limited impacts on firm revenues and profits, particularly for female entrepreneurs. A randomized design was used to compare the impacts of two types of business training programs targeting women with established small businesses in urban Tanzania. The basic version relied on in-class sessions to strengthen the participants’

Tanzania's rapid labor productivity growth has been accompanied by a proliferation of small, largely informal firms. Using Tanzania's first nationally representative survey of micro, small, and med...

Modern availability of rich geospatial datasets and analysis tools can provide insight germane to the design of field experiments. Design of field experiments, and in particular the choice of sampl...

Despite billions of dollars spent by policy institutions and academics, very few programs designed to increase managerial skills among microenterprises are cost-effective. This short paper highligh...

We suggest new evidence on minimum age regulations using a natural experiment. In 1998, a constitutional reform has changed the minimum working age from 14 to 16 in Brazil. The reform was the legislative counterpart of a broad set of measures taken by a government strongly committed to fighting child labor. We document the fact that enforcement and compliance may have been heterogeneous across regions

We test the long-standing hypothesis that agricultural households in low-income contexts engage in intermittent enterprise activity as a way to mitigate shocks. We link panel data on smallholder coffee farmers in Tanzania with a time series of global coffee prices. We first verify that global coffee prices matter for these households, through their effects on farmgate prices, quantity of coffee sold

Low take-up of interventions is a common problem faced by evaluations of development programs. A leading case is financial education programs, which are increasingly offered by governments, nonprofits, and financial institutions, but which often have very low voluntary participation rates. This poses a severe challenge for randomized experiments attempting to measure their impact. This study uses a

Over the coming decade, much more genetic data will enter into the study of economic development. This paper provides an example and emphasizes the uses and misuses of such information. It has asse...

This paper compares costs of living across world cities. The International Comparison Program (ICP) reports price levels across world economies in its calculation of purchasing power parity through...

In Sub-Saharan Africa, individuals frequently transfer a substantial share of their resources to members of their social networks. Social pressure to redistribute, however, can induce disincentive ...

This study exploits contract-level data from Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess the impact of a new credit registry on the use of borrower collateral versus third-party guarantees. Among first-time b...

This paper investigates the impact of management training programs on garment clusters in Vietnam and Tanzania. The study found that in the medium run firms showed improvement once they had identif...

Short-term human mobility has important health consequences, but measuring short-term movement using survey data is difficult and costly, and use of mobile phone data to study short-term movement is only possible in locations that can access the data. Combining several accessible data sources, Senegal is used as a case study to predict short-term movement within the country. The focus is on two main