This paper assesses the impact of social assistance benefits on household welfare in Moldova. Ignoring standard issues of impact evaluations such as selection bias, behavioral responses, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, an incidence analysis suggests that increased spending on social...

The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. It also calls for donors to be more responsive to the quality of recipient country systems: the optimal level of their use, in terms of maximizing the...

After the tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, the recovery of fishing was limited while non-fishing sectors temporarily expanded. This paper shows that fishermen's ex-post labor supply responses continued to be constrained by the provision of low quality production assets. The average fishing...

Knowledge about development effectiveness is constrained by two factors. First, the project staff in governments and international agencies who decide how much to invest in research on specific interventions are often not well informed about the returns to rigorous evaluation and (even when they...

Impact evaluations aim to measure the outcomes that can be attributed to a specific policy or intervention. Although there have been excellent reviews of the different methods that an evaluator can choose in order to estimate impact, there has not been sufficient attention given to questions...