By focussing on human capital investment, the Mexican Oportunidades program will influence the economic choices of the rural poor. To understand how beneficiaries may alter their behaviour as a result of this intervention, this paper uses administrative data to analyse the economic activities of...

The sluggish supply response in most developing countries to the apparently favourable agricultural market situation of the past few years can be explained by the limited ability of price incentives to bring about an increase in production and marketed surplus in the presence of binding...

Evaluating the impact of poverty-reduction programs on fertility is complicated given that changes in incentives to have children take time to be incorporated into decision making and evaluation periods are usually quite brief. We explore the use of birth spacing as a short-run indicator of the...

The paper presents an analysis of the role of two forms of social capital — linking and bonding — on two key farm outcomes: on-farm crop diversity and household well-being. Where market transactions are limited, social capital is an important household asset for accessing seed and...

Using data from Bolivia, this paper analyzes seed market participation and how transaction costs in these markets influence intracrop biodiversity and the influence of biodiversity on yields. Results indicate that seed market attributes such as distance and market-level biodiversity have a...

In poverty reduction programs, a significant number of beneficiaries change program status. An analysis of Oportunidades' data from urban Mexico shows that beneficiaries that drop out for behavioral and administrative reasons are those who are marginally eligible, improving targeting through...

This article proposes a general pattern of rural development in which increases in per capita income are associated with a decline in the importance of agricultural production and a rise in the importance of non-agricultural income sources. Following the approach to examining Engel's Law, we use...

This paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning more than 25 years from six communities in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The analysis explores how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non-traditional...

This paper uses a duration analysis based on adoption data spanning more than 25 years from six communities in the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The analysis explores how household characteristics and external trends play into both the adoption and diffusion processes of non-traditional...