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This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 lockdown measures on children's school resilience. Using an individual fixed-effect linear probability model on Nigeria data, it exploits the quasi-randomness of these measures to estimate their effect on school attendance after the lockdown was lifted. The results show that COVID-19 lockdown measures reduced children's probability of attending school after the school system reopened. This negative impact increased with children's age, reaching a peak among those whose education was no longer compulsory. For schoolchildren in that age group, the negative effect of COVID-19 lockdown measures is likely to be permanent, which, if not reversed, will undermine the quality of the economy-wide future labor force. The paper also finds evidence that in the child marriage-prone North-West part of Nigeria that these measures increased gender inequality in education among children aged 12 to 18. This result suggests that COVID-19 lockdown measures may exacerbate harmful traditional practices such as child marriage.

Climate change and weather shocks pose major challenges for household income security and well-being, especially for smallholder farmers’ communities. In such communities, imperfect risk insurance and labor markets may induce households to use traditional institutions such as polygyny to harness their size and composition to their resilience strategies against these shocks. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing how polygyny’s interaction with droughts affects crop yields. For identification, the paper relies on the spatial variation in polygyny’s prevalence across Mali’s rural communes and the randomness of drought episodes. The findings show that polygynous communities are more resilient to drought-induced crop failure. Exploration of the mechanisms shows that polygynous communities diversify their income sources more than monogamous ones, including via child marriage—a phenomenon known to undermine women’s outcomes. As the literature links polygyny to underdevelopment, interventions to eliminate it should make formal resilience and adaptation strategies available to drought-prone communities. Failure to do so may entrench political opposition to enforcing a ban on polygyny and child marriage.

This paper assesses the relationship between the length of recall and nonrandom error in agricultural survey data. Using data from the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture in Malawi and Tanzania, the paper shows that key input and output variables are systematically related to the length of the recall period, indicating the presence of nonrandom measurement error. With longer recall periods, farmers report greater quantities of harvest, labor, and fertilizer inputs. Farmers list fewer plots as the recall period increases. The paper argues that it is plausible that farmers overestimate plot-level outcomes, or they forget some of their more marginal plots due to longer recall periods. The analysis also finds evidence of measurement error related to the length of recall in common measures of agricultural productivity. The size of the recall effect typically varies between 2 and 5 percent per additional month of recall length, which is economically significant. With data reliability affecting policy effectiveness, improving agricultural survey data quality remains an important concern. Mainstreaming objective measures where possible and reducing the risk of recall error through shorter recall periods appear to be promising avenues to improve the quality of key variables in agricultural surveys.