Intensified use of agricultural inputs, particularly fertilizer, is a possible route to improved agricultural productivity. Field trials of these technologies show substantial increases in yields, but typically are done on highly monitored experimental plots rather than by farmers themselves.

For policy purposes, it is important to understand the relative efficacy of various methods to target the poor. Recently, participatory methods have received particular attention. We examine the effectiveness of a hybrid two-step process that combines a participatory wealth ranking and a...

We partnered with a micro-lender in Mali to randomize credit offers at the village level. Then, in no-loan control villages, we gave cash grants to randomly selected households. These grants led to higher agricultural investments and profits, thus showing that liquidity constraints bind with...

High transaction and contracting costs are often thought to create credit and savings market failures in developing countries. The microfinance movement grew largely out of business process innovations and subsidies that reduced these costs. We examine an alternative approach, one that infuses...

Empirical applications of poverty measurement often have to deal with a stochastic weighting variable such as household size. Within the framework of a bivariate distribution function defined over income and weight, I derive the limiting distributions of the decomposable curves. The poverty line...

Kakwani [Econometrica, 48, 2 (1980), 437-446)] introduced the S-Gini poverty indices as a generalization of Sen’s poverty index. I propose a sample estimator for the indices and establish its asymptotic normality under weak conditions. An explicit variance formula is presented. The poverty...