Conditional cash transfers have been adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade. Although the impacts of these programs have been studied extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms through which cash and conditions affect household decisions remains incomplete. This...

Increasing the schooling attainment of girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. The authors evaluate the impact of a program that gives scholarships to girls making the transition between the last year of primary school and the first year of secondary school in Cambodia. They show...

A family preference for sons over daughters may manifest itself in different ways, including higher mortality, worse health status, or lower educational attainment among girls. This study focuses on one measure of son preference in the developing world, namely the likelihood of continued...

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic...

Children in developing countries have deep deficits in math and language. Personalized coaching for teachers has been proposed as a way of raising teacher quality and child achievement. The authors designed a coaching program that focused on one aspect of teacher quality - teacher-child...

There is considerable evidence that young children in many developing countries suffer from profound deficits in nutrition, health, fine and gross motor skills, cognitive development, and socio-emotional development. Early childhood development (ECD) outcomes are important markers of the welfare...

The impact of cash transfer programs on the accumulation of human capital is a topic of great policy importance. An attendant question is whether program effects are larger when transfers are "conditioned" on certain behaviors, such as a requirement that households enroll their children in...

Paxson and Schady examine the relationship between early cognitive development, socioeconomic status, child health, and parenting quality in a developing country. They use a sample of over 3,000 predominantly poor pre-school age children from Ecuador and analyze determinants of their scores on...

The impact of macroeconomic crises on parents' investments in the human capital of their children is a widely contested issue. The author analyzes the effects of the profound macroeconomic crisis in Peru in 1988-92 on the schooling and employment decisions made by urban school-age children. He...

The effect of economic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. The authors use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the impact of the profound 1988-92 economic crisis in Peru on infant mortality and anthropometrics. They show that there was an...