Proxy-means testing is a popular method of poverty targeting with imperfect information. In a now widely-used version, a regression for log consumption calibrates a proxy-means test score based on chosen covariates, which is then implemented for targeting out-of-sample. In this paper, the...

Workfare schemes impose work requirements on beneficiaries. This has seemed an attractive idea for self-targeting transfers to poor people. This incentive argument does not imply, however, that workfare is more cost-effective against poverty than even poorly-targeted options, given hidden costs...

India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification...

Public knowledge about India's ambitious Employment Guarantee Scheme is low in one of India's poorest states, Bihar, where participation is also unusually low. Is the solution simply to tell people their rights? Or does their lack of knowledge reflect deeper problems of poor people's agency and...

In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the...

While liberalizing key factor markets is a crucial step in the transition from a socialist control-economy to a market economy, the process can be stalled by imperfect information, high transaction costs, and covert resistance from entrenched interests. The authors study land-market adjustment...

The decollectivization of agriculture in Vietnam was a crucial step in the country's transition to a market economy. But the assignment of land use rights had to be decentralized, and local cadres ostensibly had the power to corrupt this process. The authors assess the realized land allocation...

This paper shows how differences in aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can be additively decomposed into a pure economic-growth component, a component attributed to differences in the distribution of income, and components attributed to "non-income" factors and differences...

This paper is motivated by two stylized facts about poverty in Africa: female-headed households tend to be poorer, and poverty has been falling in the aggregate since the 1990s. These facts raise two questions: How have female-headed households fared? And what role have they played in Africas...

Divorce and widowhood succeeded by remarriage are common for women in Africa. A key question is how such discontinuous marital trajectories affect women's well-being. Women's marital trajectories in Senegal are described and correlated with measures of voice, resource constraints, and...