The debate over whether to provide food assistance and the form that this assistance should take has a long history in economics. Despite the ongoing debate, little rigorous evidence exists that compares food assistance in the form of cash versus in-kind. This paper uses a randomized evaluation...

Discussions regarding the merits of cash and food transfers by academics and implementers alike focus on their relative impacts. Much less is known about their relative costs. We apply activity-based costing methods to interventions situated in Ecuador, Niger, Uganda, and Yemen, finding that the...

In this paper we examine which farmers would be early entrants into weather indexinsurance markets in Ethiopia, were such markets to develop on a large scale. We do this by examining the determinants of willingness to pay for weather insurance among 1,400 Ethiopian households that have been...

This paper provides a structured overview of the concept of resilience for use in discussions surrounding food security and nutrition. It defines resilience as the capacity that ensures adverse stressors and shocks do not have long-lasting adverse development consequences. It links the discourse...

Conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs)—cash grants to poor families that are conditional on their participation in education, health, and nutrition services—have become a vital part of poverty reduction strategies in many countries, particularly in Latin America. In Conditional...

This paper identifies the cumulative impact of early schooling investments on later schooling outcomes in the context of a developing country, using enrollment status and relative grade attainment (RGA) as short- and long-run measures of schooling. Using a child-level longitudinal dataset from...

"While famines and other episodes of severe hunger receive significant press coverage and attract much public attention, chronic hunger and malnutrition are considerably more prevalent in Africa. It is estimated that 14 percent of children are born with low birthweights every year, around 45...