An extensive multi-disciplinary literature examines the effects of learning one's HIV status on subsequent risky sexual behaviors. However, many of these studies rely on non-experimental designs; use self-reported outcome measures; or both. In this study, we investigate the effects of a randomly...

There is widespread interest in estimating the number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger. Current global counts rely on combining each country's total food balance with information on distribution patterns from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent research has...

Agricultural and other physically demanding sectors are important sources of growth in developing countries but prevalent diseases such as malaria adversely impact the productivity, labor supply, and occupational choice of workers in these sectors by reducing physical capacity. This study...

This paper uses six nationally representative household consumption surveys to develop successive poverty profiles for Indonesia over a fifteen-year period of sustained high growth followed by rapid contraction. Adopting a ‘cost-of-basic-needs’ approach to poverty determination (an approach...

One feature common to many post-socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for...

Could a partial subsidy for child education increase children's participation in paid work? In contrast to much of the theoretical and empirical child labor literature, this paper shows that child work and school participation can be complements under certain conditions. Using data from the...

There is wide variation in how consumption is measured in household surveys, both across countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs produce consumption estimates differentially influenced by contrasting types of...

This paper investigates an alternative proxy for individual worker productivity in physical work settings: a direct measure of physical activity using an accelerometer. First, the paper compares worker labor outcomes, such as labor supply and daily productivity obtained from firm personnel data,...