This paper analyzes the impact of comprehensive and universal early childhood development programs on outcomes in middle childhood. I exploit the birth eligibility cutoff of a pioneer intervention of this type in Chile and use administrative data on grade point averages, standardized test...

I exploit the staggered roll-out of a universal early childhood development program in Chile to assess the impact of a comprehensive approach to early childhood development on outcomes in middle childhood. Using variation across time and municipalities, I study outcomes such as school...

Targeting of national anti-poverty programs in low-income countries commonly relies on statistical procedures involving household-level survey data, while small-scale poverty-alleviation programs often employ so-called community-based targeting, where village communities themselves identify...

We investigate the properties of health insurance demand in Burkina Faso, where we offered poor households a voluntary health insurance product at half the usual price. The targeting procedure we implemented delivers a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, which identifies the price elasticity...

A body of recent studies has compared the ability of proxy-means testing (PMT), a data-driven poverty targeting procedure, and community-based targeting (CBT), a participatory method, to identify consumption-poor households. Motivated by the facts that targeted benefits typically reach...

While a large literature examines the immediate and long-run effects of public health insurance, much less is known about the impacts of total program exposure on child developmental outcomes. This paper uses an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the effect of cumulative eligibility gain...

The proposal involves the establishment of 'welfare accounts' for every person in a country. There are to be four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

The study discusses the aspirations and preferences of youth in rural sub-Saharan Africa using a large-scale SMS-based survey data and complements it with an investigation on the causal effects of adolescent aspirations on migration decisions when youth in southwestern Ethiopia. The...

The paper studies the effects of Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program implemented in rural areas in Colombia since 2002, on school enrolment and child labour. Using a difference-in-difference framework, our results show that the program increased school participation of 14 to...