Many governments in developing countries implement programs that aim to address nutrional failures in early childhood, yet credible evidence on the effectiveness of these interventions is scant. This paper evaluates the impact of a large-scale, government-run, food fortification program on child...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a large-scale government initiative (NPEGEL/KGBV) that provided earmarked funds for addressing girls' special needs to public schools in rural India. Our empirical strategy exploits local variation in program eligibility around a threshold based on the...

This paper evaluates the impact of a conditional food supplementation program on child mortality in Ecuador. The program (PANN 2000) was implemented by regular staff at local public health posts and consisted of offering free micronutrient-fortified food for children aged 6–24 months in...

We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...

This paper provides regression discontinuity evidence on long-run and intergenerational education impacts of a temporary increase in federal transfers to local governments in Brazil. Revenues and expenditures of the communities benefiting from extra transfers temporarily increased by about 20%...

Does additional government spending improve the electoral chances of incumbent political parties? This paper provides the first quasi-experimental evidence on this question. Our research design exploits discontinuities in federal funding to local governments in Brazil around several population...