An assessment of the welfare gains from a targeted social program can be seriously biased unless it takes proper account of the endogeneity of program participation. Bias comes from two sources of placement endogeneity: the purposive targeting of the geographic areas to receive the program, and...

The authors provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of three child-health outcomes related to the Millennium Development Goals: the infant mortality rate, the child mortality rate, and the prevalence of malnutrition. Using data from Demographic and Health Surveys, they go beyond...

The authors try to determine whether children sent to work in rural Bangladesh are caught in a poverty trap, with the extra income to poor families from child labor coming at the expense of the children's longer-term prospects of escaping poverty through education. The poverty trap argument...

The authors assess whether the placement of bank branches in Bangladesh responds to unexploited potential for nonfarm rural development. They compare the branch location choicesof a large new private nonprofit bank, the famous Grameen Bank, with those of more traditional government banks. They...

The authors model the household demand for child care, the mother's participation in the labor force, and her working hours in Romania. Their model estimates the effects of the price of child care, the mother's wage, and household income on household behavior relating to child care and mothers...

Indonesia's adopted development model has proved to be the most successful in alleviating poverty and benefiting workers in developing countries. The government's development efforts focused on agriculture, education, and transport infrastructure. It emphasized providing productive employment...

Using new international data, the authors test for an inverse U-shaped, or"Kuznets,"relationship between industrial water pollution and economic development. They measure the effect of income growth on three proximate determinants of pollution: the share of manufacturing in total output, the...

Lederman and Maloney examine the empirical relationships between trade structure and economic growth, particularly the influence of natural resource abundance, export concentration, and intra-industry trade. They test the robustness of these relationships across proxies, control variables, and...

Young, single, women workers dominate the labor-intensive textile, clothing, and footwear industries in Indonesia. This survey interviewed 300 such workers to examine three main questions: (1) Are firms complying with labor regulations? (2) Are women workers aware of their legal rights with...

The author estimates the effects on growth of commodity price shocks, and uncertainty within an established empirical growth model. Ex-post shocks, and ex-ante uncertainty have been treated in the empirical literature as if they were synonymous. But they are distinct concepts, and it is both...