Cash transfer programs can provide important financial support for poor households in developing countries and are becoming increasingly common. However the potential for mistargeting of program funds is high. This article focuses on the social consequences arising from misallocation of...

This article uses household panel data to provide robust evidence on the effects of BRAC’s (Building Resources across Countries) Targeting the Ultra-poor (TUP) program in Bangladesh. We use alternative treatment-comparison pairs; in addition to BRAC’s own classification, we exploit type 1...

Using a unique data set collected among farmers in India’s semiarid tropics, we document the surprising prevalence of risk-taking behavior in the face of realistically framed high-stakes gambles. We hypothesize that this apparently anomalous behavior is due to a combination of credit...

Despite the popularity of school meals, little evidence exists on their effect on health outcomes. This study uses newly available longitudinal data from the state of Andhra Pradesh in India to estimate the impact of the introduction of a national midday meal program on anthropometric z-scores...

We analyze the individualization of farm units in Mali in the sense of a transformation of purely collective farms into mixed units in which private plots coexist with collective fields. Since a moral-hazard-in-team problem plagues production on the latter and the household head extracts his...

We investigate the effect of entering magnet classes on the educational performance of high school students in China. Using the regression discontinuity design and data from a high school in Hebei Province, we find that enrollment in a magnet class can increase students’ gross final...

In the early twentieth century, the Japanese colonial government initiated an island-wide malaria eradication campaign in Taiwan, resulting in not only a rapid decline in malaria across time but also elimination of disparity across regions. Exploiting variations in malaria deaths caused by the...

Using household panel data for rural India covering 1993–94 and 2004–5, we test whether scheduled castes (SCs) and other minority groups perform better or worse in terms of income when resident in villages dominated by (i) upper castes or (ii) their own group. Theoretically, upper-caste...