This paper revisits the extent of seasonality in African livelihoods. It uses 19 years of monthly food prices from 20 markets and three years of nationally representative household panel surveys from Tanzania. Trigonometric specifications are introduced to measure the seasonal gap. When samples...

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This paper reviews and synthesizes...

The paper proposes a modification of Baulch's parity bounds model to measure the market integration of food markets in developing countries. Instead of extrapolating a single observation of transaction costs, it estimates transaction costs. Predicted transaction costs compare well with survey...

With food prices on the rise, understanding the transmission of price shocks, both internationally and domestically, is central for trade policy analysis. This paper examines spatial market integration and its determinants for ten key food products in Bolivia, across the four most important...

This paper evaluates a program targeted to adolescent girls in Tanzania that aims to empower them economically as well as socially. The program was found to be highly successful in Uganda in terms of economic, health, and social outcomes. In contrast, this evaluation finds that the program did...

To assess the conventional view that assets uniformly improve childhood development through wealth effects, this paper tests whether different types of assets have different effects on child education. The analysis indicates that household durables and housing quality have the expected positive...

This paper estimates the impacts of mobile broadband coverage on household consumption and poverty in Nigeria, the largest economy and mobile broadband market in Africa. The analysis exploits a unique dataset that integrates three waves of a nationally representative longitudinal household...

Do poor households shop in a way that leaves money on the table? A simple way to maximize consumption, conditional on available cash, is to avoid regularly purchasing small amounts of nonperishable goods when bulk discounts are available at modestly larger quantities. Using two-week transaction...

How do civil servants in district water and sanitation departments address problems of water access in rural communities in Tanzania? What are the bureaucratic procedures they follow? How do the bureaucratic procedures around formulating budgets, managing money, and interacting with communities...

This paper looks at the structural marginalization of ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities in six pilot economies (Bulgaria, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Tanzania, and Vietnam) and proposes a new methodology for collecting cross-country comparable data on antidiscrimination legal...