Poor sanitation and open defecation are thought to be a major cause of diarrhea and intestinal parasite infections among young children. In 1999, India launched the Total Sanitation Campaign with the goal of achieving universal toilet coverage in rural India by 2012. This paper reports on a...

The adoption of new clinical practice patterns by medical care providers is often challenging, even when the patterns are believed to be efficacious and profitable. This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine the effects of temporary financial incentives paid to medical care clinics...

Using data from an experimental supportive intervention to India's malaria control program, this paper studies the impact of leveraging local non-state capacity to promote mosquito net usage and recommended fever care-seeking patterns. The supportive activities were conducted simultaneously by...

This study examines the effect of performance incentives for health care providers to provide more and higher quality care in Rwanda on child health outcomes. The authors find that the incentives had a large and significant effect on the weight-for-age of children 0-11 months and on the...

The authors conducted a unique randomized experiment to estimate the impact of two alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on household demand for routine preventative health services in rural Burkina Faso. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either...

This paper develops a multi-sector, small open economy Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model, which includes the accumulation of human capital, built via public expenditures in education and health. Four possible fiscal rules are examined for total public investment in infrastructure,...

This paper examines the links between adverse events, depression, and decision making in Nigeria. It investigates how events such as conflicts, shocks, and deaths can affect short-term perceptions of welfare, as well as longer term decisions on economic activities and human capital investments....

This paper reviews the evidence on the importance of human capital for macro-economic development. Through the lens of a simple aggregate production function, human capital might increase output per capita by directly entering in the production process, incentivising the accumulation of...

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...

This paper estimates private and social returns to investment in education in Turkey, using the 2017 Household Labor Force Survey and alternative methodologies. The analysis uses the 1997 education reform of increasing compulsory education by three years as an instrument. This results in a...