The assessment of the impact of social programs is the subject of lively, sometimes heated debate over whether program evaluation is best conducted either by comparing mean outcomes from a randomized intervention or by using econometric techniques with nonrandom samples. This paper contributes...

The importance of children’s nutritional status for subsequent human capital formation, the limited evidence of the effectiveness of social protection interventions on child nutrition, and the absence of knowledge on the intra-household impacts of cash and food transfers or how they are shaped...

Most empirical investigations of the effects of cognitive skills assume that they are produced by schooling. Drawing on longitudinal data to estimate production functions for adult verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills, we find that: (1) School attainment has a significant and substantial effect...