Development practitioners are coming to a consensus that participation by the intended beneficiaries improves project performance. But is there convincing evidence that this is true? Skeptics have three objections: 1) quot;Participation is not objective -- project rankings are subjective; 2) this...

A lot can be learned about the impact of an antipoverty program by studying income replacement for those observed to leave the program after its retrenchment. A Bank-supported workfare program in Argentina is found to have a sizeable impact on participants' incomes

Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample. In this paper, the...