The recently released United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) social protection strategic framework and the World Bank social protection and labor strategy call for taking a systems approach to social protection as a way to help countries, communities, families and...

Development from conception to five years of age can determine later life outcomes ranging from educational achievement, labor market success, to risky and delinquent behaviors. Crises can cause nutritional deprivation which can negatively affect physiological and neurological development during...

Child labor is pervasive across sub-Saharan Africa. A common assumption is that monetary poverty is its most important cause. The paper investigates this hypothesis with empirical evidence by exploring structural, geographic, monetary, demographic, cultural, seasonal and school-supply factors...

Knowledge is central to development. The World Bank invests about one-quarter of its budget for country services in knowledge products. Still, there is little research about the demand for these knowledge products and how internal knowledge flows affect their demand. About 49 percent of the...

Support for economic reforms has often shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began successfully lost public support. This paper shows that learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of sampling without replacement. This...

Collective action by women's networks has been a strong driver of legislative change in many countries across the world. Women's groups in Botswana have used advocacy tools such as testing the implementation of gender equality principles in the national court system. In 1992, women's legal...

In the past decade, conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have become an important component of social policy in developing countries. While the impacts of these programs have been well researched with respect to their effectiveness to achieve intended outcomes, less is known about their...

Cash transfer programs are widely used in settings where child labor is prevalent. Although many of these programs are explicitly implemented to improve children's welfare, in theory their impact on child labor is undetermined. This paper systematically reviews the empirical evidence on the...