This article assesses the impact of the East Asian financial crisis on farm households in two of the region's most affected countries. Indonesia and Thailand, using detailed household-level survey data collected before and after the crisis began. Although the nature of the shocks in the two...

Despite wide use of women's decisionmaking indicators, both as a direct measure of intrahousehold decisionmaking and as a proxy for women's empowerment or bargaining power, little has been done to explore what such indicators capture and how effective they measure program impacts on empowerment....

Adoption of productivity and income-enhancing agricultural technologies is conspicuously low in Africa south of the Sahara. Farmers' beliefs regarding the authenticity of agricultural inputs are important for explaining technology adoption: if farmers do not believe that inputs are genuine, they...

In low-income countries, primary school students often fall far below grade level and primary dropout rates remain high. Further, in some countries, educators encourage their weaker students to drop out before reaching the end of primary school. These educators hope to avoid the negative...

There is a general consensus that Food for Education (FFE) programs increase primary school participation. Although this view is widely held, there is limited causal evidence to support it. Moreover, little is known about how the design of FFE programs affects schooling outcomes. This paper...

Some neighborhoods in Dhaka have successfully organized an alternative to municipal trash collection and some have not. What determines whether a neighborhood or community is likely to undertake collective action?Pargal, Gilligan, and Huq try to identify the determinants of private,...

In low-income countries, educators often encourage weak primary students to drop out before reaching the end of primary school in order to avoid the negative attention they receive when their students perform poorly on primary leaving exams. We conducted an experiment in rural Uganda that sought...