International development

Credit constraints are considered to be an important barrier hindering adoption of preventive health investments among low-income households in developing countries. We find labelling loans is a viable strategy to improve uptake of lumpy preventive health investments.

Many children in developing countries grow up in unstimulating environments, leading to deficiencies in early years’ developmental outcomes, particularly cognition and language. Interventions to improve parenting in the first 3 years of life have a clear impact on these outcomes, but the sustainability of effects is mixed, particularly for scalable interventions. There is little evidence of the effect of following-up an early life intervention with another one immediately afterwards. The objective of this study is to help fill this gap.

Rajasthani women typically leave school early and marry young. We develop a novel discrete choice methodology using hypothetical vignettes to elicit average parental preferences over a daughter’s education and age of marriage, and subjective beliefs about the evolution of her marriage market prospects.

Unlike performance incentives for private sector managers, little is known about performance incentives for managers in public sector bureaucracies. Through a randomized trial in rural China, we study performance incentives rewarding school administrators for reducing student anemia—as well as complementarity between incentives and orthogonally assigned discretionary resources.

The political resource curse is the idea that natural resources can lead to the deterioration of public policies through corruption and rent-seeking by those closest to political power. One prominent consequence is the emergence of conflict. This paper takes this theory to the data for the case of Mozambique, where a substantial discovery of natural gas recently took place.

We study the effectiveness of a community-level information and mobilization intervention to reduce open defecation (OD) and increase sanitation investments in Nigeria. The results of a cluster-randomized control trial in 246 communities, conducted between 2014 and 2018, suggest that average impacts are exiguous.

We study the relationship between child work and cognitive development in four Low and Middle Income Countries.

While poverty may impair decision-making, some of the apparently irrational behaviour observed among the poor may have a rational expectation. In particular, estimates of "present-bias" among the poor may be exaggerated if poor individuals are credit-constrained and expect to have greater liquidity in future. I conduct an experiment in rural Pakistan which provides evidence of this effect.

With the aim of determining the welfare implications of price change in consumption data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that an absence of cycles in this preference relation characterizes a model of demand where consumers trade-off the utility of consumption against the disutility of expenditure.

Ration shop systems allow households to purchase limited quantities of some commodities at a fixed subsidized price and are in widespread use throughout the developing world. I construct a model of piece-wise increasing commodity taxation to consider whether the use of ration shops can be rationalized by the characteristics of developing countries: limited government capacity to observe household incomes and high commodity price risk.

In a new CSAE working paper, IFS researcher Dr Rachel Cassidy uses a randomised controlled trial to examine the link between intra-household bargaining and use of new contraceptive technologies in Mozambique.

Our study contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development.

This report presents a detailed overview of the baseline data collection activities as part of the project "Improving early childhood development in rural Ghana through scalable low-cost community-run play schemes''. The project is collaboration between The Institute for Fiscal Studies (UK), Lively Minds (UK, Ghana) and Innovations for Poverty Action (Ghana), and is funded by the Jacobs Foundation and Global Innovation Fund (GIF).

High quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) are critical to children’s development and their success in adult life. Ghana has shown substantial commitment to improving ECCE, with one of the highest pre-school enrolment rates in Sub Saharan Africa. However despite this, significant barriers to improvements in ECCE remain, especially in rural areas.