Conditional Cash transfer (CCT) programs have been shown to have positive effects on a variety of outcomes including education, consumption and health visits, amongst others. We estimate the long-run impacts of the urban version of Familias en Acción, the Colombian CCT program on crime, teenage...

We specify a structural life-cycle model of consumption, labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects. The sources of risk are shocks to productivity, job destruction, the process...

Youth unemployment in Latin America is exceptionally high, as much as 50% among the poor. Vocational training may be the best chance to help unemployed young people at the bottom of the income distribution. This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth...

The 1996 PRWORA reform introduced time limits on the receipt of welfare in the United States. We use variation by state and across demographic groups to provide reduced form evidence showing that such limits led to a fall in welfare claims (partly due to “banking” benefits for future use), a...

This paper evaluates the effects of the implementation of a structured early stimulation curriculum combined with a nutritional intervention through public large-scale parenting support services for vulnerable families in rural Colombia, known as FAMI, using a clustered randomized controlled...

We use matched employer-employee data from Sweden to study the role of the firm in affecting the stochastic properties of wages. Our model accounts for endogenous participation and mobility decisions. We find that firm-specific permanent productivity shocks transmit to individual wages, but the...

Improving school quality with limited resources is a key issue of policy. It has been suggested that instructing teachers to follow specific practices together with tight monitoring of their activities may help improve outcomes in under-performing schools that usually serve poor populations....

We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1-12 in India, based on the Young Lives Survey. India has over 70 million children aged 0-5 who are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child...

We develop an equilibrium lifecycle model of education, marriage and labor supply and consumption in a transferable utility context. Individuals start by choosing their investments in education anticipating returns in the marriage market and the labor market. They then match based on the...

The impact of school resources on the quality of education in developing countries may depend crucially on whether resources are targeted efficiently. In this paper we use a randomized experiment to analyze the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralized a portion of the...