Using three waves of survey data from fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia for 2005?09, the paper examines the determinants of local volunteer labor after the tsunami. Volunteer labor is the village public sector labor force for maintenance, clean-up and renovation of public capital. While also...

The paper explores whether one of the largest programs in the world for women's empowerment and rural livelihoods, the Indira Kranti Patham in Andhra Pradesh, India, has had an impact on the economic and social wellbeing of households that participate in the program. The analysis usespanel data...

Using data from a field experiment in 500 villages, this paper studies how local institutions affect the quality of governance, as measured by aid distribution outcomes. In villages where elected councils exist and manage distributions, aid targeting improves. However, if the distribution is not...

This paper uses primary data from rural north India to show that participation in a community-level female empowerment program significantly increases access to employment, physical mobility, and political participation. The program provides support groups, literacy camps, adult education...

Recruiting and retaining leaders and public servants at the grass-roots level in developing countries creates a potential tension between providing sufficient returns to attract talent and limiting the scope for excessive rent-seeking behavior. In China, researchers have frequently argued that...

The resurgence of deliberative institutions in the developing world has prompted a renewed interest in the dynamics of citizen engagement. Using text-as-data methods on an original corpus of village assembly transcripts from rural Tamil Nadu, India, this paper opens the "black box" of...

Using household data specifically collected for the purpose of evaluation, the authors empirically evaluate the impact on household income of a rural program in China that focuses on increasing women's economic and social participation in the local community. They find that the program...

This article investigates the causal relationship between women's schooling and fertility by exploiting variation generated by the removal of school fees in Ethiopia. The increase in schooling caused by the reform is identified using both geographic variation in the intensity of its impact and...

In parts of Asia, South Caucasus, and the Balkans, son preference is strong enough to trigger significant levels of sex selection, result in the excess mortality of girls, and skew child sex ratios in favor of boys. Every year, 1.8 million girls under the age of five go ?missing? because of the...

Tanzania is home to the third highest population of stunted children in Sub-Saharan Africa, with about 2.7 million children under the age of five failing to reach their full potential of growth attainment compared with the reference population as per the World Health Organization standards....