Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia are likely to hold large numbers of very poor rural people into the foreseeable future. Although both history and theory suggest a preeminent role for agricultural growth in poverty reduction in poor agrarian economies, such growth today faces new...

The paper evaluates an Indian maternal conditional cash transfer scheme. Launched in 2005, the program gives women cash transfers for receiving maternal and child health care services. Data are drawn from India’s District Level Household Survey to evaluate the program’s impact. Results...

Over last few decades, there has been a growing interest among researchers in understanding the link between trade liberalization and regional disparities within the context of an individual country. In this study, we develop the first ever single-country multiregional Computable General...

Efforts by international development agencies to design gender-sensitive projects have sharpened their focus on women’s participation in community-level water governance. In some cases, such goals have enhanced women’s self-confidence and developed their skills despite having negligible...

We assess the impact of an approach in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh that combines micro-credit with efforts to target the poor, address their specific needs, and enhance their economic potential. Our results support the pro-poor nature of the program and point toward benefits in terms of...

Microcredit and small and medium enterprise (SME) finance are often pitched as alternative strategies to create employment opportunities in low-income communities. So far, though, little is known about how employment patterns compare. We integrate evidence from three surveys to show that,...

Using a nationally representative survey from Bangladesh, we examine the relationship between women’s empowerment in agriculture, measured using the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index, and per capita calorie availability, dietary diversity, and adult body mass index (BMI). Accounting...

Gender quotas, decentralization of irrigation management, and reliance on MGNREGA for labor provision challenge the traditional patriarchal canal management system by institutionalizing women as formal decision-makers and members of the irrigation labor force in northern India. Based on a survey...

While there are many positive societal implications of increased female labor force participation, working may increase a woman’s risk of domestic violence. Using data I collected from Bangladesh, I document a positive correlation between work and domestic violence, but only among women with...

While previous studies evaluate the impact of social capital on development outcomes, there are very few empirical studies on determinants of social capital formation. We use unique long panel data from Sri Lanka to examine the mechanism of social capital formation in an imperfect credit market....