This paper uses national survey data to estimate up-to-date private rates of return to education in Burkina Faso. Mincer earning regressions are fitted to wage data for women and men, and for public and private sector workers. The main results indicate that rates of return rise by level of...

Using data we collected in rural Burkina Faso, we examine how children's cognitive abilities influence resource constrained households' decisions to invest in their education. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school-aged children, regardless of current school enrollment....

Resource transfers among households have received considerable interest among economists in recent years. Two of the main reasons for the surge of interest in household transfers are the information on human nature conveyed by transfer behavior and the implication on income redistribution policy...

This paper uses national survey data to estimate up-to-date private rates of return to education in Burkina Faso. Mincer earning regressions are fitted to wage data for women and men, and for public and private sector workers. The main results indicate that rates of return rise by level of...

This paper explores the extent of consumption smoothing between 1981 and 1985 in rural Burkina Faso. In particular, we examine the extent to which livestock, grain storage and interhousehold transfers are used to smooth consumption against income risk. The survey coincided with a period of...

We conducted a unique randomized experiment to estimate the impact of 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 conditional or...

We evaluate the causal effects of a program that constructed high quality girl-friendly primary schools in Burkina Faso, using a regression discontinuity design 2.5 years after the program started. We find that the program increased enrollment of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 by 20...