A revised version was published as Convexity and Sheepskin Effects in the Human Capital Earnings Function: Recent Evidence for Filipino Men. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 65 (2), May 2003.Data on education in the Philippines show that there are large differences in the private rate...

A revised version was published as Picking the Poor: Indicators for Geographic Targeting in Peru. The Review of Income and Wealth 48 (3, September): 417-33, 2002.Geographic targeting of social programs to the poor has become increasingly important in Peru. The potential payoffs of such targeting...

A revised version was published as The Allocation and Impact of Social Funds: Spending on School Infrastructure in Peru (with Christina Paxson). World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 297-319, 2002.Education projects of the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) have reached poor districts...

The effect of economic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. Paxson and Schady use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the impact of the profound 1988-92 economic crisis in Peru on infant mortality and anthropometrics. They show that there was an...

A variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at an early age. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer...

The authors examine how a government-run cash transfer program targeted to poor mothers in rural Ecuador influenced the health and development of their children. This program is of particular interest because, unlike other transfer programs that have been implemented recently in Latin America,...

The impact of cash transfer programs on the accumulation of human capital is a topic of great policy importance. An attendant question is whether program effects are larger when transfers are quot;conditionedquot; on certain behaviors, such as a requirement that households enroll their children...

Venezuelaamp;apos;s agricultural sector is heavily regulated and protected. As part of structural adjustment, the government is considering major reform of its agricultural trade policies. The strategy is to introduce competition into the economy by removing government price controls and...

A family preference for sons over daughters may manifest itself in different ways, including higher mortality, worse health status, or lower educational attainment among girls. This study focuses on one measure of son preference in the developing world, namely the likelihood of continued...

Does child labor decrease as household income rises? This question has important implications for the design of policy on child labor. This paper focuses on a program of unconditional cash transfers in Ecuador. It argues that the effect of a small increase in household income on child labor...