Policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing...

We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on student performance. A geographic discontinuity in the policy's implementation provides identifying variation. We find no effects of the hardship...

We evaluate the impact of the Gambian hardship allowance, which provides a salary premium of 30-40% to primary school teachers in remote locations, on student performance. A geographic discontinuity in the policy's implementation provides identifying variation. We find no effects of the hardship...

Using a discontinuity in the funding scheme, we evaluate the impact of home visits and child care centers on poor children and mothers in Ecuador. We find that home visits are beneficial for children's cognitive outcomes and health and for mothers' psychological well-being but reduce mothers'...

Height-for-age (HA) and weight-for-age (WA) of children are standard measures to study the determinants of stunting and short-term underweight. Rather than studying these indicators separately, this paper looks at their interaction and therefore at the dynamics of height and weight. Considering...

Height-for-age (HA) and weight-for-age (WA) of children are standard measures to study the determinants of stunting and short-term underweight. Rather than studying these indicators separately, this paper looks at their interaction and therefore at the dynamics of height and weight. Considering...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

This paper uses data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey to describe and model the determinants of interhousehold transfers. Russian households have experienced large reductions in income during the post-Soviet transition period, with a particularly severe decline occurring in the...

The economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime. In contrast, little is known about such strategies in wartime. This paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by Rwandan households during 1991-2001, a period characterized by civil war and...