The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer programme implemented in rural areas in Colombia in 2002, on school enrolment and child labour. Using a quasi-experimental approach, our methodology makes use of an interesting feature of the data, which allows us...

The extent of entrepreneurial activity in an economy with poorly developed capital markets depends on the distribution of wealth, though in potentially complex ways. A non-parametric model of the wealth effect on self-employment is estimated using micro data on the occupational choices of return...

It is widely assumed that pervasive credit market failures mean that a person's current wealth is critical to whether or not that person can take up opportunities to start a new business. The authors show that inequality in wealth can be either good or bad for the level of entrepreneurship in an...

This paper explores the implications for public policy of the fact that individuals have incomplete but private information about their exposure to infectious disease when they make migration decisions. In a 2-period model we study conditions under which the presence of quarantine measures may...

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification....

This research is part of a large evaluation effort, undertaken by a consortium formed by IFS, Econometria and SEI, which has considered the effects of Familias en Acción on a variety of outcomes one year after its implementation. In early reports, we focussed on the effects of the programme on...

The paper tests for nonlinearities in the wealth effect on self-employment, as can arise from startup costs or liquidity constraints. Using both nonparametric and parametric methods, we show that the relationship between the probability of a return migrant to Tunisia starting up a business and...

This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the head from the household, mainly due to death or divorce, affects children’s school enrolment and work participation in rural Colombia. In our empirical specification we use household-level fixed effects to deal with the fact that...

This paper uses the Millennium Cohort Study to look at ethnic differences in birth outcomes for a cohort of English children born in 2000 and 2001. There is an increasingly large literature showing that longer gestation and higher birthweight are positively associated with cognitive and...

We use UK administrative data to estimate the differential in labour market outcomes between Ethnic Minority benefit claimants and otherwise identical Whites. In many cases, Minorities and Whites are simply too different for satisfactory estimates to be calculated and results are sensitive to...