"This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP), the largest social protection program in Sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa. Using Propensity Score Matching techniques, we find that the program has little impact on participants on average, due in...

"This paper investigates whether public investments that led to improvements in road quality and increased access to agricultural extension services led to faster consumption growth and lower rates of poverty in rural Ethiopia. Estimating an instrumental variables model using Generalized Methods...

We examine the role of gender in adoption and diffusion of orange sweet potato, a biofortified staple food crop being promoted as a strategy to increase dietary intakes of vitamin A among young children and adult women in Uganda. As an agricultural intervention with nutrition objectives,...

We estimate the impact of Bolsa Família on a range of education outcomes, including school participation, grade progression, grade repetition, and dropout rates. Using a large-sample household panel survey from 2005–2009 collected for this evaluation, we develop a statistically balanced...

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...

"Most investigations into the importance and determinants of adult cognitive skills assume that (1) they are produced primarily by schooling, and (2) schooling is statistically predetermined or exogenous. This study uses longitudinal data collected in Guatemala over 35 years to investigate...

"The current global agreement governing food aid—the Food Aid Convention (FAC)—will expire in 2007. It has come under heavy criticism as has the diffuse set of broader food aid governance institutions that has emerged in the last 50 years. These institutions are characterized by overlapping...

"The objective of this study is to validate the World Food Programme's (WFP) method of establishing the prevalence of food insecurity. WFP's method has two parts: (1) the construction of a Food Consumption Score (FCS) and (2) the classification of food security status based on the FCS. Our...

"A growing body of evidence suggests that conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs can have strong, positive effects on a range of welfare indicators for poor households in developing countries. However, the contribution of individual program components toward achieving these outcomes is not...

This paper examines the impact over the life course of early childhood growth failure as measured by achieved height at 36 months. It uses data collected on individuals who participated in a nutritional supplementation trial between 1969 and 1977 in rural Guatemala and who were subsequently...