The concept of wellbeing is gaining popularity in the study of quality of life and cultural significance of living. The paper aims to contribute to our understanding of objective and subjective wellbeing by exploring the perceptions of women left behind by out-migrating husbands on their quality...

In 1999 Ecuador experienced an economic crisis that was characterized by drastic increases in prices and the eventual adoption of the dollar as its currency. While many reports show that household consumption decreased and poverty increased, there are no studies on the impact of the crisis on...

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....

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...

We examined the effects of Ecuador's Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH) - an unconditional cash transfer program that was rolled-out using a randomized design - on health and development outcomes in very young children. Communities that were randomly assigned to the treatment group began receiving...

Violence against women is a major health and human rights problem yet there is little rigorous evidence as to how to reduce it. We take advantage of the randomized roll-out of Ecuador's cash transfer program to mothers to investigate how an exogenous increase in a woman's income affects domestic...

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...

Pushed by increasing availability of price data and extensive market liberalisation efforts in many developing countries, research on food market integration has evolved rapidly over the last two decades. Empirical methods to measure market integration diverged in two directions: on the one...

Official poverty figures in Uganda are flawed by the fact that the underlying poverty lines are based on a single national food basket that was constructed in the early 1990s. In this paper, we estimate a new set of poverty lines that accounts for the wid

Human fertility is likely to affect agricultural production through its effect on the supply of agricultural labor. Using the fact that in traditional, patriarchal societies sons are often preferred to daughters, we isolated exogenous variation in the number of children born to a mother and...