Conditional cash transfer programs with female beneficiaries have scope to increase women’s intrahousehold decision-making power. Yet quantitative evidence is limited. We show that Brazil’s Bolsa Família program has significant impacts on women’s decision making, but with considerable...

This study evaluates a large social protection program in rural Ethiopia, the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). The effectiveness of the PSNP is of interest because the program was implemented at scale in one of Africa’s poorest countries, which has limited physical and communications...

There is a general consensus that food for education (FFE) programs increase primary school participation. Although this view is widely held, there is limited causal evidence to support it. Moreover, little is known about how the design of FFE programs affects schooling outcomes. This article...

"The economic motivations for investing in the education and nutritional status of primary-school-aged children are well established. Moreover, investments in both of these forms of human capital are likely to benefit from substantial complementarities. However, in developing countries, poor and...

"The primary goal of emergency food aid after an economic shock is often to bolster short-term food and nutrition security. However, these transfers also act as insurance against other shock effects, such as destruction of assets and changes in economic activity, which can have lasting...

"This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP), the largest social protection program in Sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa. Using Propensity Score Matching techniques, we find that the program has little impact on participants on average, due in...

"This paper investigates whether public investments that led to improvements in road quality and increased access to agricultural extension services led to faster consumption growth and lower rates of poverty in rural Ethiopia. Estimating an instrumental variables model using Generalized Methods...

We evaluate the effectiveness of targeting for Brazil's Bolsa Alimentação, a nutrition-oriented cash transfer program conditioned on beneficiary participation in health activities. Geographic targeting of program funds relied on adjusted estimates of municipality child stunting prevalence, or...

This article assesses the impact of the East Asian financial crisis on farm households in two of the region's most affected countries. Indonesia and Thailand, using detailed household-level survey data collected before and after the crisis began. Although the nature of the shocks in the two...