This paper analyzes complementarities between different Millennium Development Goals, focusing on child mortality and how it is influenced by progress in the other goals, in particular two goals related to the expansion of female education: universal primary education and gender equality in...

Sex ratios at birth rose sharply in the South Caucasus countries after 1991, but recent data indicate that this trend is turning. What caused this rise, and what can be done to accelerate its normalization? Traditional kinship systems in the region are similar to those of other settings with...

This paper studies the sharp increase in violence experienced in Mexico after 2006, known as"The War on Drugs,"and its effects on human capital accumulation. The upsurge in violence is expected to have direct effects on individuals'schooling decisions, but not indirect effects, because there was...

The paper investigates determinants of civic participation in local budget processes in rural areas in the Kyrgyz Republic by using data from the Life in Kyrgyzstan survey, conducted in 2012. The analysis of the data suggests that although civic awareness and interest in local budget processes...

Using household survey data, this paper estimates the mortality impact of improved water and sanitation access in order to evaluate the potential contribution of water and sanitation investment toward achieving the child mortality targets defined in Millennium Development Goal 4. The authors...

This paper aims to investigate empirically how international migration and remittances in Indonesia, particularly female migration, affect child outcomes and labor supply behavior in sending households. The authors analyze the Indonesia Family Life Survey data set and apply an instrumental...

This paper explores the reduction of food insecurity in Bolivia, adopting a supply side approach that analyzes the role of agricultural spending on vulnerability. Vulnerability to food insecurity is captured by a municipal level composite -- developed locally within the framework of World Food...

This paper examines how different types of workers in 17 middle-income countries were affected by labor market retrenchment during the great recession. Impacts on different types of workers varied by country and were only weakly related to the severity of the shock. Among active workers, youth...

This paper quantifies the magnitude of transitions across occupational categories in Colombia, a country with high unemployment and informality but quickly increasing its social security coverage for health. The analysis makes use of a panel of households between 2008 and 2009, representative of...

In this paper, the authors investigate the effect of positive income shocks on the mental health of adolescent girls using experimental evidence from a cash transfer program in Malawi. They find that the provision of monthly cash transfers had a strong beneficial impact on the mental health of...