The authors conducted a unique randomized experiment to estimate the impact of two alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on household demand for routine preventative health services in rural Burkina Faso. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either...

Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households' decisions to invest in their education. To address the endogeneity of child ability measures, the analysis uses rainfall shocks experienced in utero or early childhood to...

The authors conduct a randomized experiment in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or unconditional. Families under the conditional...

To examine the impact of Rwanda's 1994 genocide on children's schooling, the authors combine two cross-sectional household surveys collected before and after the genocide. The identification strategy uses pre-war data to control for an age group's baseline schooling and exploits variation across...

This study conducted a randomized control trial in rural Burkina Faso to estimate the impact of alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on education, health, and household welfare outcomes. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either conditional or...

This paper studies the long-term and intergenerational effects of the 1970s Indonesian school construction program, which was one of the largest ever conducted. Exploiting variation across birth cohorts and districts in the number of schools built suggests that education benefits for men and...

Conflict between and within countries can have lasting health and economic consequences, but identifying such effects can be empirically challenging. This paper uses household survey data from Eritrea to estimate the effect of exposure to the 1998–2000 Eritrea–Ethiopia war on children's...

We measure the extent of language assimilation among children of Hispanic immigrants. Our identification strategy exploits test language randomization (English or Spanish) of Woodcock Johnson achievement tests in the New Immigrant Survey and lets us attribute test score differences solely to...

We consider the influence of household-based production on human capital investment. In data from rural Burkina Faso, we document a positive correlation between the presence of girls and enrollment that disappears in households that are able to send out or receive in children. We argue that the...

We combine Rwandan household survey data with event data on the timing and location of localized crop failure and armed conflict to examine the impact of these distinct shocks on children’s health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the shocks’ geographic...