Seguro Popular was introduced in 2002 to provide health insurance to the 50 million Mexicans without Social Security. This paper tests whether the program has had unintended consequences, distorting workers' incentives to operate in the informal sector. The analysis examines the impact of Seguro...

In the past 10 years, Ethiopia experienced high and consistent growth, invested in public goods provision to poor households, and saw impressive gains in well-being for many households. This paper exploits variation in sectoral growth and public goods provision across zones and time, to examine...

To what degree can vulnerability to extreme weather events be mitigated by access to a rural livelihoods program, particularly with regard to the impacts on women? This paper addresses this question through a natural experiment arising from two independent but overlapping sources of variation:...

This paper evaluates how the Philippines utilize social protection systems and programs to help households better manage disaster risk. Exposure and vulnerability to natural disasters and the effects of climate change are particularly high in the Philippines. At the same time, the Philippines...

Climate risk is an important driver of long-term poverty dynamics, especially in rural regions. This paper builds a dynamic, multi-generation household model of consumption, accumulation, and risk management to draw out the full consequences of exposure to climate risk. The model incorporates...

When social security is established to provide pensions to parents, their reliance upon children for future financial support decreases, and their need to save for retirement also falls. In this study, the expansion of pension coverage from the state sector to the non-state sector in urban China...

This paper studies an innovative welfare program in Chile that combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program...

Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty...

This paper examines whether the Colombian government's expansion of social programs in the early 1990s, particularly the publicly provided health insurance, discouraged formal employment. Using household survey data and variation across municipalities in the onset of interviews for the SISBEN,...