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We present experimental evidence on a programme aimed at improving households' risk management through income diversification. The intervention targeted rural Nicaraguan households exposed to weather variability and combined a one-year conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant. Both complementary interventions provided protection against weather shocks two years after the programme ended. Households that received the productive investment grant also had higher average consumption levels. The complementary interventions facilitated income smoothing and diversification of economic activities. Relaxing capital constraints induced investments in non-agricultural businesses, while relaxing skills constraints increased wage work and migration in response to shocks.

Intra-household inequalities have long been a source of concern for policy design, but there is very little evidence about their effects. The current practice of ignoring inequality within households could lead to an underestimation of both overall inequality and poverty levels, as well as to the misclassification of some individuals with regard to their poverty status. Using a novel survey for Senegal in which consumption data were collected at a disaggregated level, this paper quantifies these various effects. In total, two opposing effects, one on mean and one on inequality, compensate each other in terms of the overall poverty rate, but individual poverty statuses are affected. Intra-household consumption inequalities account for 14 percent of inequality in Senegal. This study has also uncovered the fact that household structure and organization are key correlates of intra-household inequality and individual risk of poverty.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, started in the late 1990s in Latin America, have become the antipoverty program of choice in many developing countries in the region and beyond. This paper reviews the literature on their long-term impacts on human capital and related outcomes observed after children have reached a later stage of their life cycle, focusing on two life-cycle transitions. The first includes children exposed to CCTs in utero or during early childhood who have reached school ages. The second includes children exposed to CCTs during school ages who have reached young adulthood. Most studies find positive long-term effects on schooling, but fewer find positive impacts on cognitive skills, learning, or socio-emotional skills. Impacts on employment and earnings are mixed, possibly because former beneficiaries were often still too young. A number of studies find estimates that are not statistically different from zero, but for which it is often not possible to be confident that this is due to an actual lack of impact rather than to the methodological challenges facing all long-term evaluations. Developing further opportunities for analyses with rigorous identification strategies for the measurement of long-term impacts should be high on the research agenda. As original beneficiaries age, this should also be increasingly possible, and indeed important before concluding whether or not CCTs lead to sustainable poverty reduction.

For policy purposes, it is important to understand the relative efficacy of various methods to target the poor. Recently, participatory methods have received particular attention. We examine the effectiveness of a hybrid two-step process that combines a participatory wealth ranking and a verification household survey, relative to two proxy means tests (the Progress out of Poverty Index and a housing index), in Honduras and Peru. The methods we examine perform similarly by various metrics. They all identify most accurately the poorest and the wealthiest households but perform with mixed results among households in the middle of the distribution. Ultimately, given similar performance, the analysis suggests that costs should be the driving consideration in choosing across methods.

This paper analyzes a rich dataset from a nationally representative Nepalese household survey to study household migration decisions considering household per capita income and migration networks. The study highlights three key takeaways: (i) households with higher per capita income are less likely to migrate; (ii) households with more extensive migration networks are more likely to migrate; and (iii) migration networks have a greater influence than income on migration decisions. These findings hold across different model specifications that address potential endogeneity issues and apply to both extensive and intensive margins of migration. The results have important policy implications for Nepal, a country with high levels of temporary international migration and significant remittance inflows. The findings, unexplored hitherto, highlight an important issue relevant to other countries with similar economic, social, and cultural characteristics and large migrant populations.

This paper examines whether economic empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their marital household, and investigates the mechanism, by exploiting variation from a legal reform aimed at improving women’s inheritance rights in India. Results suggest that the reform increased women’s participation in decisionmaking but at the expense of the older generation of household members and not at the expense of their husbands. Two channels are proposed to explain this phenomenon. First, this can be driven by a shift in the family structure from traditional joint families to nuclear households. Such a change is consistent both with the increase in women’s decision-making authority, which they can exert to move out of the joint household, as well as with men’s incentives, since men have weaker financial links with their parents post-reform. Second, even within joint families, the amendments empowered young couples at the expense of the older generation of household members.

Using the Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards, we show that the household education spending on girls was higher than for boys in the period following independence. This pattern contrasts with that in the neighboring and politically interrelated country of Indonesia. We explore how religious differences and supply and demand features of private (relatively costly) Catholic schools across these countries relate to the dynamics of these policy-relevant educational gaps during the course of development in Timor-Leste.

The study evaluates the impact of returnee remittances (RRs) on the well-being of migrant households in Bangladesh using survey data collected from two migrant-intensive districts using multi-stage stratified random sampling. Our findings reveal that RRs have a positive and significant impact on subjective, objective, and relational dimensions of well-being. The pre-post analysis suggests that sensible investments in human capital and positive agreement on improved social status by migrants confirm their subjective well-being. Increased participation of migrant families in regular social ceremonies ensures relational well-being. Moreover, the findings for objective well-being employing the propensity score matching (PSM) technique indicate that compared to non-migrants, remittances contribute to returnee migrants’ land possession, income, expenditure, savings, and investment base. Hence, RRs proved to be an effective medium for ensuring migrant households' welfare in Bangladesh by contributing substantially to income generation, upgrading living standards, and improving the social recognition level. Policies aiming at launching intervention programs of financial literacy including digital finance for safe money transfer and creating a conducive atmosphere for investment are essential to maintain remittance inflows and to foster RR's positive impact more sustainable.

We conducted an experimental intervention in unelectrified areas of northern Bangladesh to investigate the effectiveness of solar products in improving children’s educational achievement. We found that treated households substituted solar lanterns for kerosene-based lighting products, helping to decrease total household expenditure. Solar lanterns increased the children’s home-study hours, particularly at night and before exams. The solar lanterns initially led to an increase in school attendance, but this effect diminished over time. However, the increased study hours and initial improvement in school attendance did not translate into improved academic performance. Varying the number of solar products within the treated households did not alter these results. Analyses that exploited the school grade treatment intensity also provided no evidence suggesting that spillover effects explained the “no academic performance effects.” These findings suggest that improving the home-study environment solely through the provision of solar products may have a limited impact on children’s educational achievement.

Households were adversely affected by the mostly nonviolent capture of Yemen’s capital in 2014. Although socioeconomically advantaged households were initially better able to cope with the shock than other households, the capture resulted in a decline in expenditure for the entire population within three months. Struggling households turned to several coping strategies—they increasingly made purchases on credit, increased their reliance on self-employment to deal with a decline in the economic climate, and reduced both the quantity and quality of foods consumed. Furthermore, there was evidence of a loss of autonomy for women, where women were less likely to oversee food purchases and more likely to be in the household during the survey interview. These results demonstrate that the capture of territory without widespread violence can result in a decline in standards of living and further illustrate the manners in which households were able to cope with the shock.