We examine how the effects of incentivizing individuals to use healthcare depend on the capacity of the health system. We study a conditional cash transfer program (JSY) in India that paid women to give birth in medical facilities. We find that JSY doubled the number of deliveries for which the...

Rajasthani women typically leave school early and marry young. We develop a novel discrete choice methodology using hypothetical vignettes to elicit average parental preferences over a daughter's education and age of marriage, and subjective beliefs about the evolution of her marriage market...

Global access to preschool has increased dramatically yet preschool quality is often poor. We use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate two approaches to improving the quality of Colombian preschools. We find that the first, which was rolled out nationwide and provides additional resources...

This paper develops a new methodology to analyze how parents in Rajasthan, India make choices about their daughters' schooling and marriage. We specify a dynamic discrete choice model in which parents face uncertainty about the quality of their daughter's future marriage offers. Parents' choices...

Striking gender gaps persist in fundamental aspects of human welfare. In India, the setting of this paper, these gaps are particularly large. Interventions often target adolescent girls with the aim of empowering them to make choices that go against the status quo - to remain in school longer or...

Basic methods to compute the required sample size are well understood and supported by widely available software. However, the sophistication of the sample size methods commonly used has not kept pace with the complexity of the experimental designs most often employed in practice. In this paper,...

This paper provides evidence on household responses to the relaxation of one barrier constraining adoption of health practices - lack of information - in a resource constrained setting. It examines the effects of a randomized intervention in Malawi which provides mothers with information on...

The objective of this paper is to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better informal insurance....

Community-based interventions, particularly group-based ones, are considered to be a cost-effective way of delivering interventions in low-income settings. However, design features of these programs could also influence dimensions of household and community behaviour beyond those targeted by the...

Health spending per capita in England has more than doubled since 1997, yet relatively little is known about how that spending is distributed across the population. This paper uses administrative National Health Service (NHS) hospital records to examine key features of public hospital spending...