It is known that Muslim women in Nigeria have significantly worse nutritional status than their Christian counterparts. The paper first shows that this difference is explained by covariates including geographic...
Marital shocks are exceedingly common for women in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper investigates whether women who have suffered a marital rupture experience lower welfare levels relative to married women...
Divorce and widowhood succeeded by remarriage are common for women in Africa. A key question is how such discontinuous marital trajectories affect women's well-being. Women's marital trajectories in Senegal...
Antipoverty policies in developing countries often assume that targeting poor households will be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This paper questions this assumption, using nutritional...
The World Bank Economic Review is a professional journal used for the dissemination of research in development economics broadly relevant to the development profession and to the World Bank in pursuing...
The authors know surprisingly little about the long-run impacts of household electrification. This paper studies the impacts on consumption in rural India over a seventeen-year period, allowing for both...
Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen...
Workfare has often seemed an attractive option for making self-targeted transfers to poor people. But is this incentive argument strong enough in practice to prefer unproductive workfare to even untargeted...
This paper is motivated by two stylized facts about poverty in Africa: female-headed households tend to be poorer, and poverty has been falling in the aggregate since the 1990s. These facts raise two questions:...
This brief summarizes the updates from the 2013 paper entitled, Testing information constraints on India's largest antipoverty program, conducted between between 2009 and 2010 in India. The study observed...
In 2006, India embarked on an ambitious attempt to fight poverty by attempting to introduce a wage floor in a setting in which many unskilled workers earn less than the minimum wage. The 2005 national...
Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare...
Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their...
India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor...
In 2005 India introduced an ambitious national anti-poverty program, now called the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. The program offers up to 100 days of unskilled manual labor...
In the developing world, poor rural women and their children spend considerable time collecting water. Do women living in areas where more time is needed for water collection tend to participate less in...
Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially...
Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially...
Institutional features of the African setting -- large extended families and imperfect credit and land markets -- matter to the equity and efficiency roles played by intergenerational linkages. Using original...
In addition to the majority Lao-Tai (67 percent of the population), the 5 million residents of the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) include three major non-Lao-Tai ethno-linguistic groups: the Mon-Khmer...