This paper uses a prospective randomized tria l to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on health outcomes for pre-school age children from low-income households in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two school feed ing programs under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals...

We use a prospective randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on educational and health outcomes of children from low income household in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two school feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals where students...

Building on anthropological evidence, we develop a model of intra-household decision making on fertility and child survival within the framework of the collective household model. We carry out a test of the implications of this framework with data from Demographic and Health Surveys in rural...

study the effects of uncertainty in future income stream on household schooling decisions. The intuition is that households that face a more volatile income stream have more incentives to build up a buffer stock to insure against unforeseen adverse shocks, and non-enrollment can be part of such...

We conduct a randomized experiment in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional (CCT) or unconditional (UCT). Families under the CCT schemes...

This paper addresses the role of tropical disease in rural demography and land use rights, using data from Onchocerciasis (river blindness) control in Burkina Faso. We combine a new survey of village elders with historical census data for 1975-2006 and geocoded maps of treatment under the...

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality “girl-friendly” primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12...

I use variation in cotton production in Burkina Faso to measure changes in local economic conditions between 1994 and 2003, which proxy for the value of children's time. I test how this variation affects schooling and child labor using three rounds of nationally representative household surveys....

Empirical studies of intra-household allocation has revealed that, in many instances, gender is an important determinant in the allocation of resources within the household. Yet, within the theoretical literature, why gender matters within the household remains an open question. In this paper,...