We study the effects of a conditional transfers program on school enrollment and performance in Mexico. We provide a theoretical framework for analyzing the dynamic educational decision and process including the endogeneity and uncertainty of performance (passing grades) and the effect of a...

Microfinance institutions (MFIs) have introduced incentive pay schemes for their credit agents to induce information acquisition on borrowers. Bonuses linked to repayment are efficient for profit-oriented MFIs but insufficient for non-profit MFIs trying to reach very poor borrowers, when...

We show that removing the link between active land use and ownership through certification can result in increased outmigration. Using the rollout of the Mexican land certification program from 1993 to 2006 we find that households obtaining land certificates were subsequently 28% more likely to...

A household's decision to send migrants is based on information the household has on the expected returns and the costs of migration. Information on migration flows from both family migrant networks and community migrant networks. Direct assistance - in the form of money, housing,...

The practice of mutual insurance is conditioned by two types of transaction costs: "association" costs in establishing links with insurance partners and "extraction" costs in using these links to implement insurance transfers. Data on insurance-motivated water exchanges among households along...

This paper analyzes how electoral incentives affected the performance of a major decentralized conditional cash transfer program intended on reducing school dropout rates among children of poor households in Brazil. We show that while this federal program successfully reduced school dropout by 8...

Mutual insurance has been shown, theoretically and empirically, to be incomplete and limited by asymmetric information and lack of enforcement mechanisms. While some research has shown that networks based on kinship, neighbourhood and ethnicity may provide a locus of insurance and thus a way of...

The Mexican land reform, one of the most sweeping in the world, proceeded in two steps: it granted peasants highly incomplete property rights on more than half of the Mexican territory starting in 1914, creating strong economic and political dependence for beneficiaries on the ruling political...

The Yemen Social Fund for Development (SFD) was established in 1997 with the support of the international community, and in particular the World Bank, to combat national poverty and reinforce the limited existing social safety net. Since its inception, SFD has been widely viewed as successful in...

The diffusion of a new agricultural technology requires farmers to learn about the existence and the benefits of the technology. What do they have to learn, how do they learn it, and from whom, is the subject of a large literature, both theoretical and empirical. The purpose of this brief is to...