Reducing urban-rural gaps in child health and nutrition is one of the most difficult challenges faced by many countries. This paper evaluates the impact of the Nutrition Improvement Program (NIP), a large-scale school meal program in rural China, on the health and nutritional status of...

Group lending has been widely adopted in the past thirty years by many microfinance institutions as a means to mitigate information asymmetries when delivering credit to the poor. This paper proposes an empirical method to address the potential omitted-variable problem resulting from unobserved...

Development projects are generally subject to a potential tradeoff between sustainability and poverty reduction. Grants are also commonly assigned without a standardized criterion. This paper proposes an innovative scoring tool that combines both a risk and poverty scorecard to prioritize...

Access to modern commercialization channels is key for smallholder farmers to be able to move away from subsistence farming and overcome poverty. However, achieving that goal is challenging for smallholders given their lack of appropriate managerial practices, production technology and...

Understanding the magnitude and source of measurement biases in self-reported data is critical to effective economic policy research. This paper examines the role of anchoring bias in self-reports of objective and subjective outcomes under recall. The research exploits a unique panel survey data...

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs are widely implemented in developing countries but evidence of their medium- and long-term effects on educational achievements is still relatively scarce. This paper examines the impact of a large-scale CCT program on high school attainment in the...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics of volatility between the corn, wheat, and soybean markets in the United States. Volatility interactions across markets, if they exist, may lower the effectiveness of diversification strategies to mitigate price risks and should be...

Understanding the sources of domestic food price volatility in developing countries and the extent to which this volatility is transmitted from international to domestic markets is critical to help design better global, regional, and domestic policies to cope with excessive food price volatility...