I review the evidence on access to water and sanitation infrastructure and child outcomes In Latin America. I show that there are large differences in access across countries and, within countries, between households living in urban and rural areas. Many papers in the public health literature...

This paper presents evidence about the impact on school enrollment of a program in Ecuador that gives cash transfers to the 40 percent poorest families. The evaluation design consists of a randomized experiment for families around the first quintile of the poverty index and of a regression...

Geographic targeting is perhaps the most popular mechanism used to direct social programs to the poor in Latin America. This paper empirically compares geographic targeting indicators available in Peru. To this effect, I combine household-level information from the 1997 Peru Living Standards...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

Across the world, the SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has disproportionately affected economically disadvantaged groups. This differential impact has numerous possible explanations, each with significantly different policy implications. We examine, for the first time in a low- or middle-income...

In many developing countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has spread much faster and wider than the number of detected cases implies. By combining data from 59,770 RT-PCR tests on mostly asymptomatic individuals with administrative data on all detected cases, we capture the spread and dynamics of the...

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. We designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality - teacher-child interactions -...