Are ostensibly demand-driven public works programs with high levels of safeguards nonetheless susceptible to political influence? This conjecture is investigated using expenditure data at the local level from India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. Focusing on one state where...

This paper estimates the causal effects of index insurance coverage on subjective well-being among livestock herders in southern Ethiopia. The randomization of incentives to purchase index-based livestock insurance and three rounds of panel data are exploited to separately identify ex ante...

A popular identification strategy in non-experimental panel data uses instrumental variables constructed by interacting exogenous but potentially spurious time series or spatial variables with endogenous exposure variables to generate identifying variation through assumptions like those of...

From 2000 to 2014, per capita gross domestic product in Sub-Saharan Africa increased by almost 35 percent in real terms, doubling in some countries. Such progress happened while agricultural productivity growth remained low in the aggregate, despite some bright spots, and poverty reduction was...

Conventional wisdom holds that Sub-Saharan African farmers use few modern inputs despite the fact that most growth-inducing and poverty-reducing agricultural growth in the region is expected to come largely from expanded use of inputs that embody improved technologies, particularly improved...

This paper uses the recently collected Living Standard Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture Initiative data sets from five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to provide a comprehensive overview of land and labor market participation by agrarian households and to formally test for...

Following the endorsement of the Millennium Development Goals, there is an increasing demand for methods to track poverty regularly. This paper develops an economically intuitive and inexpensive methodology to do so in the absence of regular, comparable data on household consumption. The minimum...

The authors evaluate the Vaso de Leche (VL) feeding program in Peru. They pose the question that if a community-based multistage targeting scheme such as that of the VL program is progressive, is it possible that the program can achieve its nutritional objectives? The authors address this by...

This paper reports on a randomized experiment conducted among Malawian agricultural households to study nonclassical measurement error in self-reported plot area and farmers' responses to new information (the objective plot area measure) that was provided to correct nonclassical measurement...