Both cognitive and non-cognitive skills matter to understand a child's opportunities and outcomes in adulthood. However, it is unclear how non-cognitive skills are acquired and what the role played by household investments is in this process. Motivated by suggestions from the medical literature...

We study the distribution of food aid in Ethiopia between 1994 and 2004 using data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. Over this period village leaders had considerable discretion in disbursing aid subject to official guidelines and periodic monitoring. We use a principal-agent model and...

Poor people often do not make investments, even when returns are high. One possible explanation is that they have low aspirations and form mental models of their future opportunities which ignore some options for investment. This paper reports on a field experiment to test this hypothesis in...

In 1984, the world was shocked at the scale of a famine in Ethiopia that caused over half a million deaths, making it one of the worst in recent history. The mortality impacts are clearly signicant. But what of the survivors? This paper provides the first estimates the long-term impact of the...

This edited book analyses what traps people in chronic poverty, and what allows them to escape from it, using long-term panel surveys from six Asian and African countries. The distinguishing feature of these studies, which were commissioned by the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, is they span...

This paper examines the contractual practices of African manufacturing firms using survey data collected in Burundi, Cameroon, Cote d`Ivoire, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Descriptive statistics and econometric results are presented. They show that contractual flexibility is pervasive and that...

This paper presents unique evidence that orphanhood matters in the long-run for health and education outcomes, in a region of Northwestern Tanzania. We study a sample of 718 non-orphaned children surveyed in 1991-94, who were traced and reinterviewed as adults in 2004. A large proportion, 19...

Much has been written on the determinants of input and technology adoption in agriculture, with issues such as input availability, knowledge and education, risk preferences, profitability, and credit constraints receiving much attention. This paper focuses on a factor that has been less well...