Billions of dollars have been spent on participatory development programs in the developing world. These programs give community members an active decision-making role. Given the emphasis on community involvement, one might expect that the effectiveness of this approach would depend on...

This paper examines an alternative to monitoring staff at a public health clinic in rural Uganda. The program sent SMS updates regarding confirmed attendance of clinic staff and activities to randomly selected cell phone-owning households in the local community. A difference-in-difference...

This paper examines the impacts of social pension provision among people of different ages. Utilizing the county-by-county rollout of the New Rural Pension Scheme in rural China, we find that, among the age-eligible people, the scheme provision leads to higher household income (18 percent) and...

Programs that increase the economic capacity of poor women can have cascading effects on children's participation in school and work that are theoretically undetermined. We present a simple model to describe the possible channels through which these programs may affect children's activities....

We report a small-sample, preliminary evaluation of the economic impact of temporary overseas work by Haitian agricultural workers. This work occurs in the United States in the context of a pilot program designed as a form of post-disaster development assistance to Haiti. We find that the...

This paper studies two experiments of early childhood development programs in The Gambia: one increasing access to services, and another improving service quality. In the first experiment, new community-based early childhood development (ECD) centers were introduced to randomly chosen villages...

Grants and services provided by the government may crowd out informal arrangements, thus weakening informal caring relations and networks. In this paper, we examine the impact of social security expansion on neighborhood cohesion of elders using China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), one of...

Governments often aim to influence the amount and sectoral allocation of private investments through explicit or implicit subsidies. The rules used to select projects to benefit from subsidies may vary, depending on the policy objective. This paper develops a general framework to allocate...

China’s Belt and Road Initiative was introduced in 2013 to revitalise the Silk Road and promote economic development and integration. This paper investigates the economic effects of the opening of the only high-speed rail (HSR) line in northwest China which connects China’s northwestern...

This paper investigates whether unconditional cash transfers can keep refugee children in school and out of work. We raise this question in the unique context of Turkey, which hosts the world's largest refugee population (including 3.6 million Syrians). Refugees in Turkey are supported by the...