We carry out a randomized control trial to test for interaction effects between training state-employed caregivers and providing mothers information to improve nutrition of preschool children aged 2-6 in rural India. Salaried caregivers are supposed to provide a mid-day meal and also advise...

This paper provides evidence of effectiveness for performance pay among government caregivers to improve child health in India. In a controlled study of 160 daycare centers serving over 4,000 children, we randomly assign individual workers to receive either fixed bonuses or incentive payments...

Environmental conditions in early life have known links to later health outcomes, but mechanisms and potential remedies have been difficult to discern. This paper uses the Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) of 2006 and 2011, combined with earlier NASA satellite observations of variation...

The affordability of nutritious diets is increasingly used as a metric of how well a food system provides access to nutritious diets for all. Recent work on least-cost diets has focused on individuals, while most food and anti-poverty programs and policies target the household level. Members...

Policies and programs to improve global nutrition increasingly aim to improve diet quality through systemic change in food environments, often focusing on the availability and price of diverse food items. Almost all of the world’s governments conduct nationally representative surveys of retail...

We introduce a new method to measure resilience, defined as the ability of an individual, household or community to recover after a decline in well-being. Our approach measures resilience as the extent to which outcomes recover, against the benchmark of symmetric mean reversion arising from...

Cameroon is among the more prosperous countries in Africa, thanks to relatively abundant agricultural land and offshore petroleum. These spurred an economic boom from unification of the country in 1972 until 1986, which was followed by a decade of decline from 1986 to 1995 and a limited recovery...

Cameroon is among the more prosperous countries in Africa, thanks to relatively abundant agricultural land and offshore petroleum. These spurred an economic boom from unification of the country in 1972 until 1986, which was followed by a decade of decline from 1986 to 1995 and a limited recovery...

Rapid increases in food supplies have reduced global hunger, while rising burdens of diet-related disease have made poor diet quality the leading cause of death and disability around the world. Today’s 'double burden' of undernourishment in utero and early childhood then undesired weight gain...

This paper addresses the role of tropical disease in rural demography and land use rights, using data from Onchocerciasis (river blindness) control in Burkina Faso. We combine a new survey of village elders with historical census data for 1975-2006 and geocoded maps of treatment under the...