Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...

This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited...

Several decades of conflict, rebellion and unrest severely weakened civil society in parts of Colombia. Desarollo y Paz is the umbrella term used to describe the set of locally-led initiatives that aim at addressing this problem through initiatives to promote sustainable economic development and...

We study food Engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in Colombia. After controlling for the endogeneity of total expenditure and for the (unobserved) variability of prices across villages, the best fit is provided by a log-linear specification....

We examine the effect of large cash transfers on the consumption of food by poor households in rural Mexico. The transfers represent 20% of household income on average, and yet, the budget share of food is unchanged following receipt of this money. This is an important puzzle to solve,...

In this paper we use an economic model to analyse data from a major social experiment, namely PROGRESA in Mexico, and to evaluate its impact on school participation. In the process we also show the usefulness of using experimental data to estimate a structural economic model. The evaluation...

This research is part of a large evaluation effort, undertaken by a consortium formed by IFS, Econometria and SEI, which has considered the effects of Familias en Acción on a variety of outcomes one year after its implementation. In early reports, we focussed on the effects of the programme on...

In this paper we use the two waves of the British Retirement Survey (1988/89 and 1994) to quantify the relationship between socio-economic status and health outcomes. We find that, even after conditioning on the initial health status, wealth rankings are important determinants of mortality and...