Cash transfers boost educational outcomes for poor children on average, but which aspects of educational performance are most responsive and which poor children benefit the most? This study examines the educational impacts of cash transfers, drawing on a randomized, community implemented conditional...

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) including the International Finance Corporation (IFC) tend to look at their development impact using project-level indicators of outputs and employment impacts.

Between 2011 and 2016, the Affordable Medicines Facility-Malaria (AMFm) subsidy program substantially increased access to WHO prequalified artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) through Africa’s private sector pharmacies and drug-sellers. While the program was rigorously and extensively evaluated,...

Countries restrict the overall extent of international travel and migration to balance the expected costs and benefits of mobility. Given the ever-present threat of new, future pandemics, how should permanent restrictions on mobility respond?

We model household investments in young children when parents and older siblings share caregiving responsibilities and when investments by older siblings contribute to young children’s human capital accumulation. Having an older sister rather than an older brother improves younger siblings’ vocabula...

Limited resources mean that policymakers must make tough choices about which investments to make to improve education. Although hundreds of education interventions have been rigorously evaluated, making comparisons between the results is challenging. This paper proposes using learning-adjusted years...

Based on the economic sector in which household members work, we use microsimulation to estimate the distributional consequences of COVID-19-induced lockdown policies in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. Our estimates of the poverty consequences are worse than many others’ projections because ...