Balochistan Province of Pakistan initiated two pilot programs attempting to induce the creation of private schools for poor girls. Randomized assignment to treatment and control groups is used to measure program effectiveness. The pilot schools were successful in urban areas, but relative...

How rapidly will child malnutrition respond to income growth? This article explores that question using household survey data from 12 countries as well as data on malnutrition rates in a cross-section of countries since the 1970s. Both forms of analysis yield similar results. Increases in income...

This study evaluates a program designed to stimulate girls' schooling through the creation of private girls' schools in poor urban neighborhoods of Quetta, Pakistan. Enrollment growth in these randomly selected neighborhoods is compared to enrollment growth in otherwise similar neighborhoods...

The effectiveness of government investments in health care depends on the public's response to price and quality as well as on whether these expenditures actually improve health outcomes. Consumers, even those in low-income households, are willing to pay fees for better health care if the fees...

School feeding programs are politically popular interventions. They are, nevertheless, difficult to assess in terms of effectiveness since their impact is partially on education and partially on school health. They are, additionally, a means to augment consumption by vulnerable populations. The...

Better child health is widely thought to improve school performance, and therefore post-school productivity. But most of the literature ignores that child health as well as child schooling reflects behavioral choices. Therefore the estimated impact of child health on child schooling in these...

Economic approaches to nutrition have focused largely on measures of child nutrition and thus have been able to ignore the issue of individual heterogeneity in energy expenditures. Ignoring such an issue may be bad science, however, especially given the case of adults, whose waking hours are...

Variation in school attributes, proximity, and fees across neighborhoods is used to identify factors that affect whether poor households send their children to government school, private school, or no school. Analysis shows that even the poorest households use private schools extensively, and...

Girls lag markedly behind boys in education in many developing countries, which may slow economic growth and increase inequity. This paper uses indicators of the output of the education production process, cognitive skills, to characterize and to investigate the determinants of the large...