Few studies have examined the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty in a broad cross-section of developing countries. The authors try to fill this gap by constructing a new data set on poverty, international migration, and remittances for 74 low- and middle-income...

Agricultural and other physically demanding sectors are important sources of growth in developing countries but prevalent diseases such as malaria adversely impact the productivity, labor supply, and choice of job tasks among workers by reducing physical capacity. This study identifies the...

Social programs are often designed under the assumption that individuals make rational decisions that improve their welfare. Yet, informational and behavioral constraints limit the extreme and chronic poor's access and participation in social programs. This paper reviews the implementation and...

Ghana is experiencing its third gold rush, and this paper sheds light on the socioeconomic impacts of this rapid expansion in industrial production. The paper uses a rich data set consisting of geocoded household data combined with detailed information on gold mining activities, and conducts two...

A long literature in demography debates the importance of place for health. This paper assesses whether the importance of dense settlement for child mortality and child height is moderated by exposure to local sanitation behavior. Is open defecation, without a toilet or latrine, worse for infant...

The association between hygiene, sanitation, and health is well documented, yet thousands of children die each year from exposure to contaminated fecal matter. At the same time, evidence on the effectiveness of at-scale behavior change interventions to improve sanitation and hygiene practices is...

This paper studies an innovative welfare program in Chile that combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program...

One of the most fruitful advances in modern economics has been the introduction of psychological realism into the model of"economic man."The World Development Report 2015 organizes the evidence about how humans actually think and make decisions into a coherent framework useful for designing...

This paper examines whether the Colombian government's expansion of social programs in the early 1990s, particularly the publicly provided health insurance, discouraged formal employment. Using household survey data and variation across municipalities in the onset of interviews for the SISBEN,...

In the last two decades more than 120 countries have adopted a version of a Medium-Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF). These are budget institutions whose rationale it is to enable the central government to make credible multi-year fiscal commitments. This paper analyzes a newly-collected dataset...