The debate over whether to provide food-assistance and the form that this assistance should take has a long history in economics. Despite the ongoing debate, little rigorous evidence exists that compares food-assistance in the form of cash versus in-kind. This paper uses a randomized evaluation...

Discussions regarding the merits of cash and food transfers by academics and implementers alike focus on their relative impacts. Much less is known about their relative costs. We apply activity-based costing methods to interventions situated in Ecuador, Niger, Uganda, and Yemen, finding that the...

The debate over whether to provide food assistance and the form that this assistance should take has a long history in economics. Despite the ongoing debate, little rigorous evidence exists that compares food assistance in the form of cash versus in-kind. This paper uses a randomized evaluation...

Increasing attention is now being paid to poverty dynamics in developing countries. This work links the extent to which households smooth consumption or smooth assets given income shocks, the empirical evidence on the churning of households in and out of poverty, and the possibility that...

This paper provides an introduction to education and health issues in sub-Saharan Africa. Cross-regional and cross-country comparisons reveal that Africa lags behind other parts of the world in the attainment of these components of human development and that there is considerable variation in...

Using a longitudinal survey from rural Guatemala, we examine the effect of an early childhood nutritional intervention on adult educational outcomes. An intent-to-treat model yields substantial effects of an experimental intervention that provided highly nutritious food supplements to children,...

Studying the sources of growth in agricultural production, examining the extent of inefficiency, and identifying the sources of such inefficiency, is an important step forward to improve the livelihood of subsistence farm households in developing countries. A stochastic frontier analysis is used...

In Ethiopia, as in many other African countries, there is a pressing need to improve household food security. An emerging consensus suggests that this is most easily accomplished through two development strategies with two complementary dimensions: investments that facilitate income generation...