How cash transfers made to women are used has important implications for models of household behavior and for the design of social programs. In this paper, the authors use the randomized introduction of an unconditional cash transfer to poor women in rural Ecuador to analyze the effect of...

There is considerable evidence that young children in many developing countries suffer from profound deficits in nutrition, health, fine and gross motor skills, cognitive development, and socio-emotional development. Early childhood development (ECD) outcomes are important markers of the welfare...

Sanchez-Paramo and Schady describe the evolution of relative wages in five Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. They use repeated cross-sections of household surveys, and decompose the evolution of relative wages into factors associated with changes in...

The authors study the impact of the 1988-94 trade liberalization in Brazil on wage distribution. They explore three main channels through which trade liberalization could have affected wage distribution: (1) increasing returns to skilled workers because of Hecksher-Ohlin adjustments to trade...

Under some conditions, macroeconomic crises can have a positive effect on the accumulation of human capital because they reduce the opportunity cost of schooling. This has profound implications for the design of appropriate social protection policies. The impact of macroeconomic crises on...

Numerous analysts have linked volunteering and participation to positive economic and political outcomes. Data from rural Peru show that volunteers have a high opportunity cost of time. They are more educated and more likely to hold a job. Other household characteristics, such as gender, marital...

A revised version was published as Convexity and Sheepskin Effects in the Human Capital Earnings Function: Recent Evidence for Filipino Men. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics 65 (2), May 2003.Data on education in the Philippines show that there are large differences in the private rate...

A revised version was published as Picking the Poor: Indicators for Geographic Targeting in Peru. The Review of Income and Wealth 48 (3, September): 417-33, 2002.Geographic targeting of social programs to the poor has become increasingly important in Peru. The potential payoffs of such targeting...

A revised version was published as The Allocation and Impact of Social Funds: Spending on School Infrastructure in Peru (with Christina Paxson). World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 297-319, 2002.Education projects of the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) have reached poor districts...

The effect of economic crises on child health is a topic of great policy importance. Paxson and Schady use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) to analyze the impact of the profound 1988-92 economic crisis in Peru on infant mortality and anthropometrics. They show that there was an...