The social and ecomomic impact of COVID-19 has been deep, wide-ranging, and multidimensional. While anecdotal evidence of distress among the poor, particularly those with informal occupations, has been widespread, effective policy response has required real-time, researched data disaggregated...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

This paper evaluates causal impacts of a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallholder women farmers on food security in Uganda through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary distance-to-branch threshold for village program eligibility. We find eligible farmers...

Many development programs that attempt to disseminate improved technologies are limited in duration, either because of external funding constraints or an assumption of impact sustainability; but there is limited evidence on whether and when terminating such programs is efficient. We provide...

The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh in April, 2013 resulting in the death and injury of more than 2000 workers from the country's export garment industry was one of the worst industrial disasters in recorded history. The tragedy galvanized a range of stakeholders to take action...

Using data from a randomised experiment in Kenya, we estimate the causal effect of social networks on technology adoption. In this experiment, farmers were invited to information sessions about the use of Tissue Culture Banana (TCB), an in vitro banana cultivation technology. We find that an...

We evaluate the impact of a role model intervention on the gender attitudes, college aspirations and education outcomes of youths in Somalia. In 2018, we randomly selected elementary schools to receive a visit from a college student. Within each treatment school, we selected four grades, two to...

Many development programs are based on short-term interventions, either because of external funding constraints or because it is assumed that impacts persist post program termination ("sustainability"). Using a novel randomized phase-out research method, we provide experimental tests of the...