Learning plays an important role in adopting new technology. While the role of learning in the decision to adopt is widely investigated in the literature, its role in knowing how to best use technology and the speed of learning is not. For instance, when farmers adopt groundwater extraction...

We study the impact of a nation-wide unconditional cash transfer program on labor supply in Iran. In 2011 the government started monthly deposits of cash into individual family accounts amounting to 29% of the median household income. We use panel data and fixed effects to study the causal...

Cash transfers are shown to improve production, increase investment and induce productive practices by farmers. Despite a rich literature showing these desired outcomes, less is known about the pathways that produce these impacts. We use a large-scale cash transfer program in Sub-Saharan Africa...

The welfare of workers in rural areas is highly affected by agricultural output volatility, caused in part by weather shocks. A volatile source of income is an important factor in inducing migration. While the impact of rainfall shocks on migration is well studied, the channels through which...

This paper evaluates the performance of different small area estimation methods using model and design-based simulation experiments. Design-based simulation experiments are carried out using the Mexican Intra Censal survey as a census of roughly 3.9 million households from which 500 samples are...

The eradication of poverty, which was the first of the millennium development goals (MDG) established by the United Nations and followed by the sustainable development goals (SDG), requires knowing where the poor are located. Traditionally, household surveys are considered the best source of...

Recent years have witnessed considerable methodological advances in poverty mapping, much of which has focused on the application of modern machine-learning approaches to remotely sensed data. Poverty maps produced with these methods generally share a common validation procedure, which assesses...

COVID-19-related school closures are pushing countries off track from achieving their learning goals. This paper builds on the concept of learning poverty and draws on axiomatic properties from social choice literature to propose and motivate a distribution-sensitive measures of learning...