This paper examines whether the son preference and fertility behavior of Muslim couples respond to the risk of inheritance expropriation by their extended family. According to traditional Islamic inheritance principles, only the son of a deceased man can exclude his male agnates from inheritance...

Scaling-up adoption of renewable energy technology, such as solar home systems, to expand electricity access in developing countries can accelerate the transition to low-carbon economic development. Using a purposely collected national household survey, this study quantifies the carbon and...

The institutional landscape of local dispute resolution in Bangladesh is rich: it includes the traditional process of shalish, longstanding and impressive civil society efforts to improve on shalish, and a somewhat less-explored provision for gram adalat or village courts. Based on a nationally...

This paper uses household survey data collected in September-October 2009 on a nationally representative sample of 2,000 households in Bangladesh to examine the nature of shocks experienced by households over the preceding 12 months and the type of coping mechanisms that were adopted. The...

The poor state of Cameroon's infrastructure is a key bottleneck to the nation's economic growth. From 2000 to 2005, improvements in information and communications technology (ICT) boosted Cameroon's growth performance by 1.26 percentage points per capita, while deficient power infrastructure...

This paper examines the role of social safety-net programs in Bangladesh run by the government and nongovernmental organizations to mitigate seasonal deprivation in the country's highly vulnerable northwest region. Specifically, the paper explores whether social safety nets are limited to...

Infrastructure investments are typically long-term. As a result, observed benefits to households and communities may vary considerably over time as short-term outcomes generate or are subsumed by longer-term impacts. This paper uses a new round of household survey as part of a local government...

Measuring the poverty and distributional impact of the global crisis for developing countries is not easy, given the multiple channels of impact and the limited availability of real-time data. Commonly-used approaches are of limited use in addressing questions like who are being affected by the...

This paper integrates information on climate change, hydrodynamic models, and geographic overlays to assess the vulnerability of coastal areas in Bangladesh to larger storm surges and sea-level rise by 2050. The approach identifies polders (diked areas), coastal populations, settlements,...

Microfinance is often criticized for not adequately addressing seasonality and hard-core poverty. In Bangladesh, a program known as PRIME was introduced in 2006 to address both concerns. Unlike regular microfinance, PRIME introduces a microfinance scheme that offers a flexible repayment schedule...