The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program implemented in rural areas in Colombia since 2002, on school enrollment and child labor. Using a difference-in-difference framework, our results show that the program increased school participation of...

We study the poverty impacts over time and space of Indonesia’s severe economy-wide crisis of 1998, using 10 large national surveys spanning 1993–2002. On allowing for shifts in relative prices stemming from the crisis, we find a sharp but geographically uneven increase in the poverty rate...

Cross-country comparisons of social indicators controlling for income and/or social spending have been widely used to measure and explain "social efficiency," analogously to "technical efficiency" in production. The article argues that these methods are clouded in ambiguities about what is being...