Community-based targeting, in which communities allocate social assistance using local information about who is poor, in experimental settings leads to nuanced allocations that reflect local concepts of poverty. What happens when it is scaled up, by either by making the stakes high, or by...

"We identify a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that we hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, we decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price...

We identify a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that we hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, we decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and exit, price...

Analyzing the distributional impacts of economic crises is important and, unfortunately, an ever more pressing need. If policymakers are to intervene to help those most adversely impacted, then policymakers need to identify those who have been most harmed and the magnitude of that harm....

One of the most sizable and least predictable shocks to economic opportunities in developing countries is major illness, both in terms of medical care expenditures and lost income from reduced labor supply and productivity. As a result, families may not be able to smooth their consumption over...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide, and are designed to promote comprehensive human capital investments in children, starting from encouraging pre-natal and maternal care and early childhood health interventions and continuing through incentivizing school attendance....

Governments seeking to provide food assistance have a choice between providing in-kind food directly to beneficiaries, or providing vouchers that can be used to purchase food on the market. To understand the differences between these policies, the Government of Indonesia randomly phased in the...

Economic theory suggests that, when designing aid programs, ordeal mechanisms that impose differential costs for rich and poor can induce self-selection and hence improve targeting ("self-targeting"). We first re-examine this theory and show that ordeal mechanisms may actually have theoretically...

This paper investigates the impact of elite capture on the allocation of targeted government welfare programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and non-experimental data on a variety of existing government transfer programs....

Concerns about fraud in welfare programs common arguments worldwide against such programs. We conducted a survey experiment with over 28,000 welfare program administrators and over 19,000 beneficiaries in Indonesia to elicit the 'marginal disutility from corruption,' i.e., the trade-between more...