As of 2007, 29 developing countries had some type of conditional cash transfer program in place, with many others planning or piloting one. However, the evidence base needed by a government to decide how to design a new conditional cash transfer program is severely limited in a number of...

Increasing the schooling attainment of girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. The authors evaluate the impact of a program that gives scholarships to girls making the transition between the last year of primary school and the first year of secondary school in Cambodia. They show...

In this paper the authors estimate the rate of return to firm investments in human capital in the form of formal job training. They use a panel of large firms with unusually detailed information on the duration of training, the direct costs of training, and several firm characteristics such as...

Instead of mean-tested conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, some countries have implemented gender-targeted CCTs to explicitly address intra-household disparities in human capital investments. This study focuses on addressing the direct impact of a female school stipend program in Punjab,...

Conditional cash transfers have been adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. This...

There is increasing evidence that conditional cash transfer programs can have large impacts on school enrollment, including in very poor countries. However, little is known about which features of program design -- including the amount of the cash that is transferred, how frequently conditions...

This paper uses a prospective randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on health and education outcomes for children from low-income households in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two school feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals where...

Middle childhood (approximately 6-12 years old) is a crucial time for developing cognitive and socio emotional competencies, and economic crises can affect children's development with long-lasting consequences for adolescence and adulthood. This note provides an overview of how economic shocks...

Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that demand for schooling is...

Uniquely among Latin American and Caribbean countries, Haiti has a largely non-public education system. Prior to the earthquake of January 2010, just 19 percent of primary school students were enrolled in public schools, with the remainder enrolled in a mix of religious, for-profit, and...