The capabilities approach claims that the freedom to achieve alternative ends is of primary moral importance to policy evaluation. We use a new Bayesian framework for estimating capabilities to conduct a capabilities-based impact evaluation of a prominent poverty-alleviation policy: cash...

Understanding land accumulation dynamics is relevant for policy-makers interested in the economic effects of land inequality in developing country agriculture. We thus explore and simultaneously test the leading theories of micro-level land accumulation dynamics using unique panel data from...

This paper analyses the channels through which growth reduces poverty by evaluating the relationship between the sectoral composition of economic growth and the rural-urban composition of poverty.Unlike previous studies, that use single country or multi-country cross-sectional data, the analysis...

We examine the relationship between the sectoral composition of economic growth and the rural-urban composition of poverty. To this end, we use a new cross-country panel dataset consisting of 146 rural and urban poverty “spells” for 70 low- and middle-income countries. We find that rural...

Conventional approaches to targeting social safety net programs select beneficiaries on the basis of income or expenditure levels. We argue that these approaches neglect human diversity and agency, which can lead to counterintuitive targeting outcomes and thus a misallocation of benefits. In...

Impact evaluation has become increasingly central to evidence-based social policy, particularly in the field of international development. While the act of evaluation requires numerous ethical decisions (e.g., regarding the problems to investigate, the tools of investigation, and the...