The safety net provided by the African extended family has traditionally been the basis for the assertion that “there is no such thing as an orphan in Africa” (Foster 2000). The assumption is that even families lacking sufficient resources to properly care for existing members are...

Drawing on original fieldwork in the slums of Ndola in Northern Zambia we isolate those features of a child's nuclear and extended family that put him most at risk of ending up on the streets. We find that older, male children and particularly orphaned children are more likely to wind up on the...

This paper investigates the short-run consumption expenditure dynamics and the interaction of public and private arrangements of ultra-poor and labor-constrained households in Malawi using an original dataset from the Mchinjii social cash transfer pilot project (one of the first experiments of...

Financial regulation affects government revenue whenever it imposes both the mandatory quantity and price of government bonds. This paper studies a banking regulation adopted by the National Bank of Ethiopia in April 2011, which forces all private banks to purchase a fixed negative-yield...

In absence of deposit insurance, underdeveloped financial systems can exhibit a coordination failure between banks, unable to commit on safe asset holding, and depositors, anticipating low deposit repayment in bad states. This paper shows conditions under which a government can solve this...