We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services. Program impacts are identified using a regression discontinuity design, exploring the fact that program eligibility is a...

"Shared prosperity" has become a common phrase in the development policy discourse. This short paper provides its most widely used operational definition – the growth rate in the average income of the poorest 40 percent of a country's population – and describes its origins. The paper...

"Shared prosperity" has become a common phrase in the development policy discourse. This short paper provides its most widely used operational definition -- the growth rate in the average income of the poorest 40 percent of a country's population -- and describes its origins. The paper discusses...

One important concern of governments in developing countries is how to phase out large safety net programs. The authors evaluate the short-run effects of one possible exit strategy-programs that promote self-employment-in Argentina. They provide evidence that a small fraction of beneficiaries...

Monitoring data are generally collected as a by-product of the process of monitoring program implementation. Yet this rich source of data have not been exploited to assess the effectiveness of the program. In this paper the authors use detailed administered data from a large-scale,...

Longitudinal patterns of child development and socioeconomic status are described for a cohort of children in Madagascar surveyed when 3-6 and 7–10 years old. Substantial wealth gradients were found across multiple domains: receptive vocabulary, cognition, sustained attention, and working...

Labor-intensive public works programs are important social protection tools in low-income settings, intended to supplement the income of poor households and improve public infrastructure. In this evaluation of the Malawi Social Action Fund, an at-scale, government-operated program, across- and...

Language tests developed and validated in one country may lose their desired properties when translated for use in another, possibly resulting in misleading estimates of ability. Using Item Response Theory (IRT) methodology, we assess the performance of a test of receptive vocabulary, the...

We evaluate the effects of a self-employment program offered to welfare beneficiaries of a large safety net program in Argentina. The program promotes self-employment by providing financial and technical assistance. Our findings show that only a small and selected subset of welfare beneficiaries...

This paper evaluates the effect of an anti-poverty program, Chile Solidario, during its first two years of operation. We find that the program tends to increases significantly their take-up of cash assistance programs and of social programs for housing and employment, and to improve education...