We provide a new education quality index for states within a developing country using 2010 Brazilian data. This measure is constructed based on the notion that the financial returns obtained from an additional year of schooling can be seen as being derived from the value that market forces assign to this education. We use migrant data to estimate returns to schooling of individuals who studied in different states but work in the same labor market. We find very heterogeneous educational qualities. In fact, Brazil displays cross-state educational quality variation almost as great as that observed across countries. We compare our index with standardized test scores, educational outcome variables, and public expenditure per schooling stage at the state level, producing new evidence related to education in a large developing country. We conduct an education quality–adjusted development accounting exercise for Brazilian states and find that human capital accounts for 26%–31% of output per worker differences. Adjusting for quality increases human capital’s explanatory power by 60%.

In 2009, the Liberian government removed a wide-reaching set of price controls. Compared with goods never subject to price ceilings, goods whose prices were liberalized showed increased prices and decreased quantity supplied. This effect was larger for products with smaller permitted markup and disproportionately affected goods in the rural consumption basket. The results do not support the hypotheses that the price controls caused queuing, allowed retailers to collude around higher price points, or were simply an instrument for corruption. Rather, they suggest that the controls effectively suppressed monopoly pricing. This provides insight into state functionality and business policy in a country with extreme poverty and weak institutions.

We provide the first quantitative analysis to scrutinize the ample ethnographic evidence that magico-religious beliefs affect the demand for conventional health care in sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on the unique case of Benin, where Voodoo adherence is freely reported and varies greatly within villages and even within households yet can be traced to historic events that are arguably exogenous to present-day health-care behavior. These features allow us to account for confounding village and household factors and address self-selection into Voodoo. We find that Voodoo adherence of the mother is associated with lower uptake of preventive health-care measures and worse child health outcomes.

About two-thirds of microfinance clients in India are reported to be in self-help groups (SHGs). We study the survival of members and groups and their differential access to credit using a census of SHGs created between 1998 and 2006 in 386 villages in eastern India. Households without land and those from disadvantaged castes exhibit higher attrition rates and smaller loans, but the main predictor of differential outcomes is education. Members with formal education receive larger loans and are more likely to remain a group member. Groups with no such members are also four times more likely to become inactive.

This paper studies second jobs as self-insurance and consumption-smoothing devices for liquidity-constrained workers who face unanticipated wage arrears. Unlike the previous consumption-smoothing literature, emphasis is given to labor market shocks in emerging economies and to a new empirical strategy: labor supply responses are identified through unanticipated changes in wage payment and repayment behavior of Ukrainian firms. Unique longitudinal data on paid and outstanding salaries show that second jobs swiftly follow the life cycle of main job shocks so that individuals abandon their coping activity after repayment. Second jobs enable households to smooth consumption against 70% of income shocks.

We investigate how land size measurements vary across three land measurement methods (farmer estimated, GPS, and compass-and-rope) and the effect of land measurement error on the inverse farm size relationship and input demand functions. Our findings indicate that self-reported measurement bias leads to overreporting for small plots and underreporting for large plots. The error is nonlinear, is not resolved by trimming of outliers, and results in biased estimates of the inverse land size relationship. Input demand functions that rely on self-reported land measures underestimate the effect of land on input utilization, including fertilizer and household labor.

Using novel data from rural Bangladesh reporting individual-level food consumption and anthropometric measures, we find substantial inequities in the intrahousehold distribution of calories and nutrients, with male household heads reported to consume disproportionately large shares. There are also smaller body mass index shortfalls for heads relative to their spouses. Further, lower economic well-being and women’s disempowerment are associated with more inequitable calorie distributions. These findings have implications for the measurement of undernourishment, where aggregate household-level data misclassify the undernourishment status of nearly a quarter of the rural Bangladeshi population due to intrahousehold inequities.

We exploit variation in the design of subnational health-care financing initiatives in Indonesian districts to assess the effects of these local schemes on maternal care from 2004 to 2010. The analysis is based on a district pseudopanel, combining data from a unique survey among District Health Offices with the Indonesian Demographic and Health Surveys, the national socioeconomic household surveys, and the village census. Our results show that these district schemes contribute to an increase in antenatal care visits and the probability of receiving basic recommended antenatal care services for households that are not targeted by the national health insurance programs. We observe a decrease in home births. However, there is no effect on professional assistance at birth. We also observe variation in scheme design across districts as well as constraints to the effectiveness of local schemes. Including antenatal and delivery services explicitly in benefits packages and contracting local rather than national health-care providers increases the effects on maternal care. Increasing population coverage reduces effectiveness, delineating limitations to local funding and risk pooling. Furthermore, we do not find any effects for districts outside Java and Bali, where access to basic health care remains a key policy concern.

This paper shows that trade policy can have significant intergenerational distributional effects across gender and social strata. We compare women and births in rural Indian districts differentially exposed to the 1991 trade reform. For lower (higher) socioeconomic status women, the tariff cuts increased (decreased) fertility and decreased (increased) the sex ratio at birth and relative survival for girls in districts more exposed to tariff cuts relative to the national trend. Relative female income increased (decreased) for lower castes (upper castes) in districts experiencing a larger loss of protection. Meanwhile, total household expenditure relatively decreased for all castes, with larger declines for lower castes.