In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

Most support programs targeted at small firms in low- and middle-income countries fail to generate transformative effects at a large scale due to poor targeting, too little flexibility, and the limited size of the support, among others. This paper assesses the short-term effects of a randomized...

Despite the recent and intense debate on how to define and measure pro-poor growth, there is one important issue which has so far not received sufficient attention: how applications of pro-poor growth measurements can appropriately take into account relative price changes, which, given the...

In the middle of the nineties the rural population in Burkina Faso was seriously hit by rising food prices. Whereas cotton farmers were able to cope with this shock given the simultaneous boom in the cotton sector, food crop farmers had to withdraw children from school and to let them work more...

We assess the willingness to pay (WTP) for eyeglasses in an adult population in rural Burkina Faso using a variant of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) method. We combine the BDM approach with video and deferred payment options to analyze the role of information and liquidity constraints....

Empirical evidence suggests that regional disparities in incomes are often very high, that these disparities do not necessarily disappear as economies grow and that these disparities are itself an important driver of growth. We use a novel approach based on multilevel modeling to decompose the...

Households in rural areas still depend on informal transfers to meet subsistence needs and cope with shocks. Yet, to provide additional monetary support, formal safety nets are increasingly introduced in developing countries. However, it remains unclear whether such social protection policies...

Vision impairment is the most common disability worldwide and it is untreated in large parts of the developing world. We assess the willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for eyeglasses among adults in a resource‐poor rural setting. We elicit the WTP using the Becker‐DeGroot‐Marschak (BDM) method....