Disruption of infrastructure services can cause significant social and economic losses, particularly in the event of a natural disaster. The World Bank Group and the Government of Japan established the Quality Infrastructure Investment Partnership to focus attention on the quality dimensions of...

This paper studies the impact of the rapid expansion of the Brazilian road network, which occurred from the 1960s to the 2000s, on the growth and spatial allocation of population and economic activity across the country's municipalities. It addresses the problem of endogeneity in infrastructure...

Millions of villagers in Bangladesh are exposed to arsenic by drinking contaminated water from private wells. Testing for arsenic can encourage switching from unsafe wells to safer sources. This study describes results from a cluster randomized controlled trial conducted in 112 villages in...

A substantial literature has examined the impact of stress during the early stages of life on later-life health. This paper contributes to that literature by examining the later-life health impact of stress during adolescence and early adulthood, using a novel proxy for stress: risk of military...

An extensive multi-disciplinary literature examines the effects of learning one's HIV status on subsequent risky sexual behaviors. However, many of these studies rely on non-experimental designs; use self-reported outcome measures, or both. This study investigates the effects of a randomly...

The effect of weather shocks on children's anthropometrics is investigated using the two most recent rounds of the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey. For this purpose, climate data for each survey cluster are interpolated using daily weather-station records from the national network. The...

This paper studies the effect of increased access to antiretroviral therapy on risky sexual behavior, using data collected in Mozambique in 2007 and 2008. The survey sampled both households of randomly selected HIV positive individuals and households from the general population. Controlling for...

Economic analyses of development projects and policies often involve assigning an economic value to changes in the risk of loss of human life. A typical term used in the economic analyses is the value of statistical life, which reflects the aggregation of individuals' willingness to pay for...

Rising obesity rates are one of the most challenging public health issues in many emerging economies. The extent to which the nutritional composition of food consumed away from home is behind this rise, and the links with socioeconomic status, is not yet well understood. This paper explores this...

In a recent survey of 820 Boro (winter rice), potato, bean, eggplant, cabbage, sugarcane, and mango farmers in Bangladesh, over 47 percent of farmers were found to be overusing pesticides. With only 4 percent of farmers formally trained in pesticide use or handling, and over 87 percent openly...