While climate change is likely to increase weather risks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies to facilitate adaptation. This paper presents experimental evidence on a program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving households' risk-management through income...

Interventions aimed at increasing the income generating capacity of the poor, such as vocational training, micro-finance or business grants, are widespread in the developing world. How to target such interventions is an open question. Many programs are self-targeted, but if perceived returns...

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...

A variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at an early age. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer...

Cash transfer programs have spread rapidly as an instrument to raise household consumption and reduce poverty. Questions remain about the sustainability of cash transfer impacts in low-income settings such as Sub-Saharan Africa and, in particular, on whether cash transfers can foster productive...

In economies characterized by low labor demand and high rates of youth unemployment, entrepreneurship training has the potential to enable youth to gain skills and create their own jobs. This paper presents experimental evidence on a new entrepreneurship track that provides business training and...

Climatic shocks exacerbate consumption volatility and seasonality. When facing fluctuations in labor needs and prices, low-income rural households may rationally increase their consumption during specific seasons rather than maintaining it constant throughout the year. This makes the optimal...

Consumption of food away from home is rapidly growing across the developing world. Surprisingly, the majority of household surveys around the world haven not kept up with its pace and still collect limited information on it. The implications for poverty and inequality measurement are far from...

Using individual level employment data from Bangladesh, this paper presents empirical evidence on the relative importance of farm and urban linkages for rural nonfarm employment. The econometric results indicate that high return wage work and self-employment in nonfarm activities cluster around...

Measures of cognitive, noncognitive, and technical skills are increasingly used in development economics to analyze the determinants of skill formation, the role of skills in economic decisions, or simply because they are potential confounders. Yet in most cases, these measures have only been...