Economic shocks at birth have lasting effects on children's health several years after the shock. The authors calculate height for age z-scores for children under age five using data from a Rwandan nationally representative household survey conducted in 1992. They exploit district and time...

The dominant hypothesis in the literature that studies conflict is that poverty is the main cause of civil wars. The authors instead analyze the effect of institutions on civil war, controlling for income per capita. In their set up, institutions are endogenous and colonial origins affect civil...

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...

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...

This study constructs three indices to measure how well Brazil's young people are surviving their transition to adulthood. Youth development is difficult to quantify because of the multi-dimensionality of youth behavior. Most monitoring use individual indicators in specific sectors, making it...

Little evidence is available on whether changing global rules so as to promote human rights can enhance development outcomes. The Convention on the Rights of the Child was almost universally ratified by the mid-1990s, but it is unclear whether treaty ratification was associated with better or...

This paper uses a new standardized micro database for a large set of developing countries to (1) describe the patterns of labor market outcomes for youth, and (2) explain the contributions of supply and demand factors to youth outcomes. The paper shows that youth face various difficulties in...

Most people agree that a good investment climate is essential for growth and poverty reduction. Less clear is how to achieve it. Many reforms are complex, involving more than technical design and content. They are both political, facing opposition from organized and powerful groups-and...

Obsolete pesticides have accumulated in almost every developing country or economy in transition over the past several decades. Public health and environmental authorities are eager to reduce health threats by removing and decontaminating stockpile sites, but there are many sites, cleanup can be...

This study examines trends in school dropout at the upper secondary education level across Latin America over the past two decades, and attempts to identify factors influencing these rates. The methodology contributes to the existing literature by employing repeated cross sections of data to...