Despite the widespread belief that a substantial assault on poverty requires targeting scarce resources toward the poor, practitioners frequently claim that targeted programs deliver fewer benefits to poor households than do universal programs. This article evaluates this concern through an...

This paper explains the negative correlation between the days of work reported by fathers in rural Pakistani households and the incomes earned by their coresident adult sons, thereby contributing to research on the benefits from intergenerational coresidence. I find that the decline in fathers'...

This paper critically evaluates the design of India's Anti-poverty programmes. In recent years, successive Indian Governments have sought to improve the performance of these programmes by decentralising their administration, vesting village governments with greater responsibility for their...

This paper tests the hypothesis that the schooling of the poor reduces profits for landowners, and that such negative pecuniary externalities in turn adversely affect schooling investments made by local governments. A theoretical model of occupational choice in the presence of credit and labor...

While local governments are increasingly being vested with control over funds for public goods, concern over the capture of decentralized funds by local elites has led decentralization to be combined with central mandates which require a certain proportion of funds to directly benefit the poor....

While it is commonly believed that lack of access to government-subsidized “formal” credit underlies observed differences in farm productivity in rural India, there is little empirical evidence on this issue. In this paper I address this issue by examining whether households use the farm...

The governments of many developing economies have actively promoted the expansion of banks in rural areas, believing that such investments are necessary to reduce poverty and existing levels of wealth inequality. There is little evidence on whether such “social banking” programs succeed in...