Ajwad assesses the effectiveness of core social protection programs in Uttar Pradesh using the following criteria: i) coverage, ii) targeting efficiency; and iii) adequacy and potential impact on household welfare. The study is largely a quantitative assessment. Five main findings emerge from...

This paper assesses the impact of social assistance benefits on household welfare in Moldova. Ignoring standard issues of impact evaluations such as selection bias, behavioral responses, unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity, an incidence analysis suggests that increased spending on social...

This paper explores an empirical methodology to assess the impacts of trade reforms on household behavior in developing countries. I focus on consumption and income responses: when price reforms take place, households modify consumption and production decisions and local labor markets adjust....

This paper uses a newly assembled data set on various types of social protection spending in 154 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 to analyze the effect of the electoral cycle on the size and composition of the social protection stimulus budget. The analysis shows that the...

This paper investigates the causal impact of oil price fluctuations on financial markets since January 2014. Following a heteroscedasticity-based event study approach, the paper instruments changes in oil prices by exogenous shocks in oil supply. It finds that oil price declines raise...