Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this working paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households' decisions to invest in their education. The analysis uses variations in rainfall experienced in utero or early childhood to measure ability. It finds that rainfall...

This paper estimates the impact of armed conflict on subsequent health outcomes using detailed geographic information on households’ distance from conflict sites—a more accurate measure of conflict exposure— and compares the impact on children exposed in utero versus after birth. The...

The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades later. Using variation across ethnicity...

The authors conducted a unique randomized experiment to estimate the impact of two alternative cash transfer delivery mechanisms on household demand for routine preventative health services in rural Burkina Faso. The two-year pilot program randomly distributed cash transfers that were either...

Using data collected in rural Burkina Faso, this working paper examines how children's cognitive abilities influence households' decisions to invest in their education. The analysis uses variations in rainfall experienced in utero or early childhood to measure ability. It finds that rainfall...

Using data we collected in Burkina Faso, we explore how child ability influences parents’ decisions to invest in their children’s human capital. We use a direct measure of child ability for all primary school–aged children, regardless of current school enrollment. We explicitly incorporate...

This paper combines household survey data with event data on the timing and location of armed conflicts to examine the impact of Burundi's civil war on children's health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the war's timing across provinces and the exposure of...