Aid agencies often provide transfers in food rather than cash out of a paternalistic belief that food transfers will better improve household food security. However, evidence from Latin America shows that cash transfers often increase the share of food in consumption, counter to Engel’s Law....

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...

Ethiopia's Food Security Programme provides income transfers through public works in its Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) as well as targeted services provided through the Other Food Security Programme (OFSP) and, later, the Household Asset Building Programme (HABP) designed to improve...

This study evaluates a large social protection program in rural Ethiopia, the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP). The effectiveness of the PSNP is of interest because the program was implemented at scale in one of Africa’s poorest countries, which has limited physical and communications...

"This paper assesses the impact of Ethiopia's Productive Safety Nets Programme (PSNP), the largest social protection program in Sub-Saharan Africa outside of South Africa. Using Propensity Score Matching techniques, we find that the program has little impact on participants on average, due in...

Regression discontinuity design (RDD) is a useful tool for evaluating programs when a single variable is used to determine program eligibility. RDD has also been used to evaluate programs when eligibility is based on multiple variables that have been aggregated into a single index using...

The authors try to identify the determinants of private, community-based provision of a public good - in this case, trash collection. Using survey data for Dhaka, Bangladesh, where some neighborhoods have successfully organized an alternative to the municipal trash collection service, they...

Ethiopia’s crop agriculture is complex, involving substantial variation in crops grown across the country’s different regions and ecologies. Five major cereals (teff, wheat, maize, sorghum and barley) are the core of Ethiopia’s agriculture and food economy, accounting for...

Individuals’ aspirations and their consequences for future-oriented behavior have received increased attention in devel-opment economics literature in recent years. At this stage, however, each study relies on ad hoc empirical instruments to measure aspirations, thereby limiting...