Food assistance is one of the most common forms of safety net programs in postconflict situations. Besides the humanitarian and promotional roles, there are widespread scepticisms of food assistance regarding its possible influence on disincentive to work and on crowding out of private...

The world’s poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

A society that believes wealth to be determined by random "luck", rather than by merit, demands more redistribution. We present evidence of this behavior by exploiting a natural experiment provided by the L'Aquila earthquake in 2009, which hit a large area of Central Italy through a series of...