During the past decade, the use of conditional cash transfers to increase investment in human capital has generated considerable excitement in both research and policy forums. Such schemes are being increasingly adopted in a number of contexts and countries to improve outcomes in health,...

A variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at an early age. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer...

Instead of mean-tested conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, some countries have implemented gender-targeted CCTs to explicitly address intra-household disparities in human capital investments. This study focuses on addressing the direct impact of a female school stipend program in Punjab,...

This paper examines the dynamic responses of income and poverty to increased investment in the human capital of new cohorts of workers, using a quantitative macroeconomic model with realistic demography. Compared to a baseline in which the rate of human capital investment currently observed in...

Social protection is absent from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and only recently has gained some prominence in the post-2015 discourse. In the past quarter century, however, rising inequality has often accompanied economic growth. At the same time, the growing importance of risk and...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from a household affects children's school enrollment and work participation in rural Colombia. The results indicate that the permanent departure of the father decreases children's school enrollment by approximately 5 percentage...

What has the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic been on poverty in Zambia, and how can social protection programs mitigate these effects? This paper estimates the pre-pandemic poverty level in Zambia and then simulates the distributional impact of COVID-19 in the country. The paper also estimates...

This paper analyzes a four-arm randomized evaluation of a multi-faceted economic inclusion intervention delivered by the Government of Niger to female beneficiaries of a national cash transfer program. All three treatment arms include a core package of group savings promotion, coaching, and...

Poor households often rely on transfers from their social networks for consumption smoothing, yet there is limited evidence on how antipoverty programs affect informal transfers. This paper exploits the randomized roll-out of BRAC's ultra-poor graduation program in Bangladesh and panel data...

Signs of development delays and malnutrition are widespread among young children in low-income settings. Social protection programs such as cash transfers are increasingly combined with behavioral change promotion or parenting interventions to improve early childhood development. This paper...