Recent labour market research has shown that a good education comprises investment in both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We examine the impact of a long-term programme designed to raise non-cognitive skills of children and adolescents in slums in Bombay. We use a cross-cutting design with...

The increased adoption of fertiliser and improved seeds are key to raising land productivity in Ethiopian agriculture. However, as in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the adoption and diffusion of such technologies has been slow. We use data from the Ethiopia between 1999-2009 to examine the role of...

We study changes in living conditions using longitudinal data covering 30 years in six villages in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, initially surveyed during 1975--1984, and resurveyed in recent years, as part of the ICRISAT Village Level Studies. Monetary welfare indicators (such as incomes,...

In this paper we test the implications of a model of network formation on data from rural Ethiopia. In contrast to the current literature, we demonstrate the critical role of both number of links and architecture in determining the impact of social networks on outcomes. Social capital matters,...

A large literature examines the link between shocks to households and the educational attainment of children. We use new panel data to estimate the impact of shocks to teachers on student learning in Mathematics and English. Using absenteeism in the 30 days preceding the survey as a measure of...

Much of the literature on consumption smoothing and on risk sharing has focused on the ability of the household as a unit to protect its consumption. Little is known about the ability of individual members of the household to keep consumption smooth over time or relative to other members of the...

A household survey conducted in rural Zimbabwe in 2001 is used to compare the position of de facto and de jure female-headed households to those with a male head. These households are characterised by different forms of poverty that impinge on their ability to improve agricultural productivity....

The model proposed here for obtaining the labor supply functions of moonlighters uses a double self-selection system to explore the husband's decision to moonlight together with his wife's decision to work. Subsequently, the labor functions are classified under two regimes depending on whether...

Most studies examining the dynamics of welfare have found large fluctuations in consumption over relatively short periods, suggesting substantial short-run movements in and out of poverty. The consequence is that cross-section poverty research may not be able to identify the poor. In this study,...

Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for the fact that households will respond to changes in school inputs. We present a dynamic household optimization model relating test scores to school and household inputs, and test its...