The causal machinery underlying sex determination is directly relevant to many questions relating gender and family composition to social and economic outcomes. In recent work, Oster highlighted a correlation between parental hepatitis B carrier status and sex of the child. One of her analyses...

Present-day policies aiming to improve the performance of credit markets, such as group lending or creation of collateral, typically aim to change incentives for borrowers. In contrast, premodern credit market interventions, such as usury laws, often targeted the behavior of lenders. We describe...

This study uses micro-data from the 1998-99 Indian Time Use Survey (ITUS; covering 77,593 persons in 18,591 households in Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Meghalaya, Orissa, and Haryana) to argue that time use data provides a natural metric for measuring "social capital" building activities...

This study uses the panel data of a randomized experiment from the Mexican PROGRESA program to evaluate the impact of drought on total calorie availability and the mitigating effects of PROGRESA on food consumption in periods of drought. Drought reduced total expenditures and total food...

Community-based selection of social program recipients has the potential to benefit from local knowledge about individuals in need. However, this information advantage might be offset by local elite capture and administrative incompetency. Using data from Indonesia's antipoverty program, Inpres...

A large body of research indicates that child development is sensitive to early-life environments, so that poor children are at higher risk for poor cognitive and behavioral outcomes. These developmental outcomes are important determinants of success in adulthood. Yet, remarkably little is known...