We use longitudinal household data and propensity score weighting methods to assess the impact of Brazil’s Bolsa Família conditional cash transfer program on schooling outcomes of children aged 6–17years. Weak aggregate effects mask considerable heterogeneity. Among girls, the program...

Most investigations of the importance of and the determinants of adult cognitive skills assume that (a) they are produced primarily by schooling and (b) schooling is statistically predetermined. But these assumptions may lead to misleading inferences about impacts of schooling and of...

This paper examines the impact of preschool malnutrition on subsequent human capital formation in rural Zimbabwe using a maternal fixed effects - instrumental variables (MFE-IV) estimator with a long term panel data set. Representations of civil war and drought “shocks” are used to identify...

Early childhood nutrition is thought to have important effects on education, broadly defined to include various forms of learning. We advance beyond previous literature on the effect of early childhood nutrition on education in developing countries by using unique longitudinal data begun during...

The hypothesis that ethnic diversity has a negative impact on public goods provision is widely accepted. Notably, most work on this issue fails to distinguish adequately between national versus subnational governance. We find that subnational empirical ev

Productivity gains are the prime engine of economic growth. This paper uses a rich amount of firms. accounting information from the Single Information Collecting Centre in Senegal over the period 1998-2011. To investigate the two main obstacles to growth,

The aid allocation literature has neglected gender-specific needs for aid. We assess the hypothesis that gender inequality in education is more likely to affect the aid allocation of donor countries with female leadership in the relevant ministry. We find

The failure of the Somali state from 1993 to 2012 represents one of the world.s most profound and prolonged cases of state collapse. Initially, education and other government services came to a standstill. With the halt of fighting in some areas, local co