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Despite increasing climatic variability and frequent weather shocks in many developing countries, there is little evidence on effective policies that help poor agricultural households manage risk. This paper presents experimental evidence on a program in rural Nicaragua aimed at improving households’ risk-management through income diversification. The intervention targeted agricultural households exposed to weather shocks and combined a one-year conditional cash transfer with vocational training or a productive investment grant. We identify the relative impact of each complementary package based on randomized assignment and analyse how impacts vary by exposure to exogenous drought shocks. The results show that both complementary interventions provide 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, as such offering better protection from shocks compared to beneficiaries of the basic conditional cash transfer and control households. Relaxing capital constraints induced investments in non-agricultural businesses, while relaxing skills constraints increased wage work and migration in response to shocks. These results show that combining safety nets with productive interventions relaxing skill or capital constraints can help households become more resilient and manage climatic variability.

Increased adoption of improved agricultural technologies is considered an essential step to address global poverty and hunger, and agronomic trials suggest intensification in developing countries could result in large yield gains. Yet the promise of new technologies does not always carry over from trials to real-life conditions, and diffusion of many technologies remains limited. We show how parcel and farmer selection, together with behavioural responses in agronomic trials, can explain why yield gain estimates from trials may differ from the yield gains of smallholders using the same inputs under real-life conditions. We provide quantitative evidence by exploiting variation in farmer selection and detailed data collection from research trials in Western Kenya on which large yield increments were observed from improved input packages for maize and soybean. After adjusting for selection, behavioural responses, and other corrections, estimates of yield gains fall to being not significantly different from zero for the input package tested on one of the crops (soybean), but remain high for the other (maize). These results suggest that testing new agricultural technologies in real-world conditions and without researcher interference early in the agricultural research and development process might help with identifying which innovations are more likely to be taken up at scale.

Replication package for EJ article "Transfers, Diversification and Household Risk Strategies: Can productive safety nets help households manage climatic variability?"

In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation and poverty reduction. A large literature has documented the short and medium-term impacts of the Mexican program and its successors in other countries. Using Progresas experimental evaluation design originally rolled out in 1997-2000, and a tracking survey conducted 20 years later, this paper studies the differential long-term impacts of exposure to Progresa. We focus on two cohorts of children: i) those that during the period of differential exposure were in-utero or in the first years of life, and ii) those who during the period of differential exposure were transitioning from primary to secondary school. Results for the early childhood cohort, 18-20-year-old at endline, shows that differential exposure to Progresa during the early years led to positive impacts on educational attainment and labor income expectations. This constitutes unique long-term evidence on the returns of an at-scale intervention on investments in human capital during the first 1000 days of life. Results for the school cohort - in their early 30s at endline - show that the short-term impacts of differential exposure to Progresa on schooling were sustained in the long-run and manifested themselves in larger labor incomes, more geographical mobility including through international migration, and later family formation.

International audience; Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programmes are important anti-poverty programmes. There is relatively little evidence, however, of ongoing effectiveness several years after they have begun. Such evidence is particularly relevant for policymakers because programme effects may become larger or smaller over time. We analyse whether children exposed since birth to a CCT in El Salvador have better schooling outcomes at initial school ages. The results demonstrate that exposure significantly increased school enrolment and attainment for five-year-olds in preschool. The pattern of impacts suggests continued programme exposure might be improving primary school readiness or shifting norms around child investment.

grant nr. ANR-I7-EURE-0001 Numerous evaluations of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs show positive short-term impacts, but there is only limited evidence on whether these benefits translate into sustained longer-term gains. This paper uses the municipal-level randomized assignment of a CCT program implemented for five years in Honduras to estimate long-term effects 13 years after the program began. We estimate intent-to-treat effects using individual-level data from the population census, which allows assignment of individuals to their municipality of birth, thereby circumventing migration selection concerns. For the non-indigenous, we find positive and robust impacts on educational outcomes for cohorts of a very wide age range. These include increases of more than 50 percent for secondary school completion rates and the probability of reaching university studies for those exposed at school-going ages. They also include substantive gains for grades attained and current enrollment for others exposed during early childhood, raising the possibility of further gains going forward. Educational gains are, however, more limited for the indigenous. Finally, exposure to the CCT increased the probability of international migration for young men, from 3 to 7 percentage points, also stronger for the non-indigenous. Both early childhood exposure to the nutrition and health components of the CCT as well as exposure during school-going ages to the educational components led to sustained increases in human capital. authorsversion published

Parenting interventions have the potential to improve early childhood development. Text messages are considered a promising channel to deliver parenting information at large scale. This paper tests whether sending text messages about parenting practices impacts early childhood development. Households in rural Nicaragua were randomly assigned to receive messages about nutrition, health, stimulation, or the home environment. The intervention led to significant changes in self-reported parenting practices. However, it did not translate into improvements in children's cognitive development. When local opinion leaders were randomly exposed to the same text message intervention, parental investments declined and children's outcomes deteriorated. Since interactions between parents and leaders about child development also decreased, the negative effects may have resulted from a crowding-out of some local leaders.

This paper analyses the long-term impacts of reservation of seats for women in the local body elections at the village level in India on children’s learning outcomes in rural Andhra Pradesh. Using the random rotation of seats reserved for women over different election cycles – 1995; 2001; and 2006, and three rounds of a panel dataset – 2002; 2007; and 2009, we analyse the impact of exposure to political reservation during critical periods of childhood. The paper shows that the reservation policy for female leaders had the largest impact on learning outcomes of primary school children when they were exposed to reservation very early in life. The results can be explained by improved health and nutrition in utero and during the first years of life. These results are suggestive of the impact women leaders have on child well-being in the long term.

International audience; International agricultural research is often motivated by the potential benefits it could bring to smallholder farmers in developing countries. A recent experimental literature has emerged on why innovations resulting from such research, which often focuses on yield enhancement, fail to be adopted due to either external or internal constraints. This article reviews this literature, focusing on the traits of the different technologies and their complexity and distinguishing between yield-enhancing, variance-reducing, and water- or labor-reducing technologies. It also discusses how farmers’ reallocation of inputs and investments when external constraints are lifted suggests that they often do not seek to increase yield or input intensity. The article further reviews evidence indicating that a technology's potential as observed in agronomical trials is not necessarily a good predictor for smallholder farmers’ demands for the technology in real-life conditions. The last section derives conclusions for the research and policy agenda.

We illustrate how randomised controlled trials (RCTs) could be used to evaluate the impact of alternative designs of the common agricultural policy (CAP). We select four policy-design issues which relate to different components of the CAP and raise a wide range of economic questions: nudges, coordination failures, equity-efficiency trade-offs, contract design. Based on examples from agricultural and social policies in developing and developed countries, we show that RCTs have provided useful rigorous evidence on similar design issues, suggesting that they could also be leveraged to help improve components of the CAP.

Commonly used personality questions fail to capture the intended personality traits in surveys in low- and middle-income countries., Can personality traits be measured and interpreted reliably across the world? While the use of Big Five personality measures is increasingly common across social sciences, their validity outside of western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations is unclear. Adopting a comprehensive psychometric approach to analyze 29 face-to-face surveys from 94,751 respondents in 23 low- and middle-income countries, we show that commonly used personality questions generally fail to measure the intended personality traits and show low validity. These findings contrast with the much higher validity of these measures attained in internet surveys of 198,356 self-selected respondents from the same countries. We discuss how systematic response patterns, enumerator interactions, and low education levels can collectively distort personality measures when assessed in large-scale surveys. Our results highlight the risk of misinterpreting Big Five survey data and provide a warning against naïve interpretations of personality traits without evidence of their validity.

International audience; There is a significant gap between the rhetoric of claims about adoption of farm-level natural resource management practices and the reality. New empirical evidence of low adoption from several developing countries suggests that on-farm natural resource management practices face significant constraints to adoption, and that they deliver heterogeneous private and public benefits. Five recommendations are given to the research community related to: targeting; scaling-up; the proper role of research; trajectories of diffusion; and measurement of environmental impacts.

International audience; Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs, started in the late 1990s in Latin A merica, have become the antipoverty program of choice in many developing countries in the region and beyond. We review the literature on their long- term impacts related to the accumulation of human capital and observed after children have reached a later s tage of their life cycle, focusing on two life- cycle transitions. The first includes children exposed to CCTs in utero or 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 socioemotional 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 possibl e, and indeed important before concluding whether or not CCTs lead to sustainable poverty reduction.

International audience; Measures of cognitive, noncognitive, and technical skills are increasingly used in development economics to analyze the determinants of skill formation, the role of skills in economic decisions, or simply because they are potential confounders. Yet in most cases, these measures have only been validated in high-income countries. This paper tests the reliability and validity of some of the most commonly used skills measures in a rural developing context. A survey with a series of skills measurements was administered to more than 900 farmers in western Kenya, and the same questions were asked again after three weeks to test the reliability of the measures. To test predictive power, the study also collected information on agricultural practices and production during the four following seasons. The results show the cognitive skills measures are reliable and internally consistent, while technical skills are difficult to capture and very noisy. The evidence further suggests that measurement error in noncognitive skills is non-classical, as correlations between questions are driven in part by the answering patterns of the respondents and the phrasing of the questions. Addressing both random and systematic measurement error using common psychometric practices and repeated measures leads to improvements and clearer predictions, but does not address all concerns. The paper provides a cautionary tale for naïve interpretations of skill measures. It also points to the importance of addressing measurement challenges to establish the relationship of different skills with economic outcomes. Based on these findings, the paper derives guidelines for skill measurement and interpretation in similar contexts.

Wossen et al. (2018) puts the spotlight on an important, and until recently underestimated, phenomenon: farmers in developing countries may often misreport whether the crop varieties they grow are improved or not. Given the key role of improved varieties in the green revolution, and ongoing debates on whether productivity gains can still be achieved and reach areas of the developing world where diffusion of improved varieties has been limited, establishing reliable empirical evidence regarding the levels of adoption of improved varieties is a first-order priority. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs are important anti-poverty programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. There is little evidence, however, of the effectiveness of ongoing CCT programs several years after they have begun. Such evidence is particularly relevant for policymakers because program effects may become larger, as with the operational cycle, or smaller, if enthusiasm on the part of the beneficiaries or the program team wanes. We analyze whether children exposed since birth to a CCT in El Salvador have better outcomes at initial school ages. As such, we capture the cumulative effects of the CCT during early childhood, combined with the current effects of the CCT transfers and conditionalities. Our results show exposure significantly increased school enrollment and early attainment for five-year olds, with smaller effects for six-year-olds. Families of the latter experienced a significant improvement as measured by a wealth index. The pattern of impacts suggests continued program exposure might be improving school readiness or shifting norms around child investment.

Interventions targeting early childhood development hold promise for increasing human capital and reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty. This paper presents results from a randomized evaluation of a preschool construction program in Cambodia, and suggests caution. The overall impact of the program on early childhood outcomes was small and statistically insignificant. For the cohort with highest program exposure, the impact on cognitive indicators was negative; with the largest negative effects among children of poorer and less educated parents. The results are consistent with frequent underage enrollment in primary school in the absence of preschools, stricter enforcement of the minimum age for primary school entry after the intervention, substitution between primary and preschool following intervention, and difference in demand responses to the new preschools between more and less educated parents. The results show that contextual and program specifics, and behavioral responses, can potentially lead to perverse effects of programs.

Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, the paper uses the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. It finds important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where panel data to follow children over time exists, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. These results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on the measure of cognitive development.

This paper starts from a review of RCT studies in development economics, and documents many studies largely ignore attrition once attrition rates are found balanced between treatment arms. The paper analyzes the implications of attrition for the internal and external validity of the results of a randomized experiment with balanced attrition rates, and proposes a new method to correct for attrition bias.We rely on a 10-years longitudinal data set with a final attrition rate of 10 percent, obtained after intensive tracking of migrants, and document the sensitivity of ITT estimates for schooling gains and labour market outcomes for a social program in Nicaragua. We find that not including those found during the intensive tracking leads to an overestimate of the ITT effects for the target population by more than 35 percent, and that selection into attrition is driven by observable baseline characteristics. We propose to correct for attrition using inverse probability weighting with estimates of weights that exploit the similarities between missing individuals and those found during an intensive tracking phase. We compare these estimates with alternative strategies using regression adjustment, standard weights, bounds or proxy information.

This article analyses the role of interactions with local leaders in amplifying poor households' investment response to a social programme. The causal effect of social interactions is identified through the randomised assignment of leaders and other beneficiaries to three different interventions aimed at increasing human capital and productive investments. Social interactions are found to augment programme impacts on households' investments in education, nutrition and income-generating activities and to affect households' attitudes towards the future.

Numerous evaluations show that conditional cash transfer programs change households’ investments in their young children, but there are many open questions about how such changes can be sustained after transfers end. This paper analyzes the role of social interactions with local female leaders for sustaining program impacts. The social interactions are identified through the randomized assignment of leaders and other beneficiaries to different cash transfer packages. Random exposure to leaders that received the largest package was found to augment short-term program impacts on households’ investments in education and nutrition, and to affect households’ attitudes towards the future during the intervention. This paper shows that the strong social multiplier effects from leaders’ treatment persisted two years after the end of the program. Households randomly exposed to female leaders with the largest package sustained higher investments in their children and reported higher expectations and aspirations for the future of their children. These results suggest that program design features that enhance ownership of a program’s objectives by local leaders may shift other beneficiaries’ norms and sustain higher levels of human capital investments.

We review the literature on the long-term impacts of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs in Latin America. Long-term impacts are defined as those that both: 1) are related to the accumulation of human capital, and; 2) are observed after beneficiary children have reached a later stage of the life-cycle. We focus on two life-cycle transitions. The first is children exposed to CCTs in utero or early childhood, who have then transitioned to school ages. The second is children exposed to CCTs during school ages, who have then transitioned to early adulthood. The evidence is inconclusive. The experimental literature finds consistent positive long-term effects on schooling, as well as some positive impacts on cognitive skills and learning, socioemotional skills and off-farm employment and income. However, many other estimates are not statistically different from zero and it is often not possible to discern whether this is due to lack of impact or to methodological shortcomings in the evaluation studies. Non-experimental evidence also is mixed. 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 continue to age, this should also be increasingly possible.

Sustainability of short-term interventions may depend on whether they manage to change families’ attitudes towards the future and related social norms. This investigation shows that role female models in very low-income settings of Nicaragua have an enormous impact in raising the bar for the rest of the community by increasing and sustaining in time basic standards in children education and health.

A variety of theories of skill formation suggest that investments in schooling and other dimensions of human capital will have lower returns if children do not have adequate levels of cognitive and social skills at an early age. This paper analyzes the impact of a randomized cash transfer program on cognitive development in early childhood in rural Nicaragua. It shows that the program had significant effects on cognitive outcomes, especially language. Impacts are larger for older pre-school age children, who are also more likely to be delayed. The program increased intake of nutrient-rich foods, early stimulation, and use of preventive health care-all of which have been identified as risk factors for development in early childhood. Households increased expenditures on these inputs more than can be accounted for by the increases in cash income only, suggesting that the program changed parents'behavior. The findings suggest that gains in early childhood development outcomes should be taken into account when assessing the benefits of cash transfer programs in developing countries. More broadly, the paper illustrates that gains in early childhood development can result from interventions that facilitate investments made by parents to reduce risk factors for cognitive development.

This paper shows that insecurity of property rights over agricultural land can have large efficiency and equity costs because of the way it affects matching in the tenancy market. A principal-agent framework is used to model the landlord's decision to rent when he takes into account the risk of losing the land to the tenant and when contract enforcement is decreasing in social distance with the tenant. These effects are quantified for the case of local land rental markets in the Dominican Republic. Results show that insecure property rights lead to matching in the tenancy market along socio-economic lines, severely limiting the size of the rental market and the choice of tenants for landlords, both with efficiency costs. Social segmentation reduces access to land for the rural poor, with high equity costs. Simulations suggest that improving tenure security would increase rental transactions by 21% and the area rented to the poor by 63%. Increased property rights security is hence beneficial not only to asset owners, but also to those with whom they might interact in the market.

This paper provides unique evidence of the positive consequences of seasonal migration for investments in early childhood development. The authors analyze migration in a poor shock-prone border region in rural Nicaragua where it offers one of the main household income diversification and risk coping strategies. IV estimates show, somewhat surprisingly, that in particular mother's migration has a positive effect on early cognitive development. The authors attribute these findings to changes in income and to the intra-household empowerment gains resulting from mother's migration, which offset potential negative ECD effects from temporary lack of parenting. This paper, hence, illustrates how increased opportunities in seasonal migration due to higher South-South mobility might positively affect early childhood development and as such long-term poverty reduction.

Summary This paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural–urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across countries and changes over time.

As the labor force in agriculture grows smaller, displaced rural workers need new options. Effective preparedness of those who leave the farm is a critical part of an overall strategy to mobilize agriculture for development.

Reforms have strongly affected agricultural employment in transition countries but in remarkably different ways. We present a theoretical model and an empirical analysis to explain differences in labor adjustment during transition. We show that the differences are due to a combination of variations in initial conditions and differences in reform policies and effects. The removal of price distortions and subsidies caused wage and price adjustments during transition and a reduction in labor demand in agriculture. Surplus labor outflow from agriculture was further stimulated by the privatization of the farm assets as they improve incentives and remove constraints for optimal factor allocation and structural adjustment. The shift to individual farms, which was especially strong in labor-intensive production systems with low labor productivity in agriculture, has reduced the outflow of labor from agriculture by improving farm governance and labor efficiency, although this effect was mitigated by losses in scale economies due to disruptions and market imperfections in transition. In general, labor outflow was considerably lower on individual farms than on corporate farms, due to a combination of factors related to human capital, access to finance, and physical capital. In the last section of the article we present a general framework for understanding labor adjustments in transition countries. Specifically, we show that there are several patterns of labor transition. In one pattern, followed by, e.g., the Czech Republic and Hungary, there is initially a strong survival of the restructured large-scale corporate farms that have laid off many workers. In the second phase of transition, gradually the importance of individual farms increases. In other countries, such as Romania, the opposite has happened. In these countries there is an immediate strong shift to individual farms, while labor use increases on average in agriculture. After this initial phase, the shift to individual farms continues, albeit more slowly, and labor use in agriculture starts to decline. Finally, our analysis shows that in countries such as Russia and Ukraine much of the surplus labor is still employed by little-reformed former collective and state farms. Major adjustments await more progress in agricultural and general reforms.

T here are several remarkable aspects of the changes in agricultural employment during transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) (henceforth referred to as "transition countries"). First, transition had a dramatic effect on agricultural employment in many countries: labor use in agriculture changed more than 50% in several countries during the first decade (figure 1). Second, the changes were very diverse. Labor use in agriculture declined by half in countries such as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovakia, and Hungary; and increased by more than 50% in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Armenia.' Third, not only were there vastly different adjustments between countries, but also within countries. In Poland, for example, labor outflow was around 50% in some regions, while agricultural employment increased in other regions. Fourth, in many cases, these variations in adjustment did not contribute to a convergence of agricultural labor use, but rather to a divergence. The largest declines occurred in countries and regions where labor use and intensity were already relatively low (such as in Central Europe). Labor use increased where agriculture employment was relatively high (such as in Southeastern Europe or the Caucasus).2 By any standard or historical reference, these are remarkable changes. Understanding the drivers of these changes is important for their own sake. These dramatic changes resulted in large adjustments for the people affected

Karen MacoursUniversity of California, Berkeley, and Katholieke Universiteit LeuvenJohan F. M. SwinnenEuropean Commission and Katholieke Universiteit LeuvenI. IntroductionEconomic reforms have induced important output and productivity changesin the agricultural sectors of transition countries (TCs). There are, however,large differences between the countries in terms of the direction and themagnitude of these changes. For example, agricultural output increased con-siderably in the East Asian TCs, while there was a large output fall in theCentral and East European countries (CEECs) and the former Soviet Union(FSU) during transition (fig. 1).

This paper reviews the challenges related to establishing credible causal links between particular interventions and aggregate food security. A first set of challenges result from the lack of a common measurement of food security, with a multitude of indicators and definitions being used in different studies, making comparisons and broader inferences particularly hard. We discuss various measures and the existing evidence on their validity. We also line out a possible approach to validating some of the multi-dimensional measures in a more comprehensive way. A second set of challenges comes from the need to have credible exogenous variation in order to establish a causal relationship between an intervention and resulting food security outcomes. We review the literature and conclude that the literature to date leaves many open questions regarding the type of interventions that might be most effective to increase food security. This is due in part to the multitude of approaches to measurement of food security, and in part due to methodological concerns that limit causal inference in many of the existing studies. Likely, the optimal policy will also be strongly context-specific, and understanding the sensitivity of impacts to contextual changes hence is equally important.

This paper reviews some of the challenges related to understanding constraints to agricultural productivity improvements in developing countries. It takes a micro-level approach to shed light on the complexity of farmers’ adoption of new technologies and practices and of climate change adaptation decisions. The main arguments are illustrated using an example from the evaluation of a randomized pilot program in Nicaragua. The paper also highlights open questions for future research., L’adoption et l’adaptation dans l’agriculture des pays en développement Cet article précise les difficultés liées à la compréhension des freins à l’amélioration de la productivité agricole dans les pays en développement. A partir d’une approche micro-économique, ce travail met en lumière la complexité de la prise de décision des agriculteurs concernant, d’une part, l’adoption de nouvelles technologies et pratiques et, d’autre part, l’adaptation au changement climatique. Les principaux arguments sont illustrés par l’exemple de l’évaluation d’un programme pilote au Nicaragua caractérisé par une expérimentation aléatoire. L’article conclut en listant des questions ouvertes pour de futures recherches., Macours Karen. Adoption and adaptation in developing country agriculture. In: Revue d’études en Agriculture et Environnement, Vol. 95, N°1, 2014. pp. 13-24.

This paper quantifies the relative importance of the different causal factors of the changes in agricultural production in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 using a production function and supply response approach. The analyses show that the deterioration of the agricultural terms of trade explains a considerable part (40 to 45 %) of the production change. The effects of the extreme weather conditions that coincided with the reforms explain 10 % to 20 % of the output decline, where as the transition uncertainty accounts for 10 % to 15 %. The shift of the production to family farms caused a productivity increase due to improved labor effort but the process of disruption of the production structures caused a (temporary) negative effect. The net effect of the restructuring was slightly positive. Privatization had a strong negative effect on the output. In Albania, Bulgaria and Romania this effect was due to declined technical eficiency. In contrast, factor productivity increases in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary completely offset this effect. The negative privatization effect in these countries was largely due to factor adjustment (mainly labor shedding), i.e. improvements in allocative efficiency. Finally, our analyses suggest that up to 25% of the output decline may be a statistical phenomenon. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Belgian National Foundation for Scientific Research (NFWO) and the FAIR program of the EU Commission. The authors thank Erik Mathijs for many discussions, Jason Hartell, Hamish Gow and participants at seminars at FAO Rome and K.U.Leuven for critical comments on earlier versions of the paper.

International audience; Households in developing countries are often highly exposed to risk and despite households' risk strategies negative shocks often result in substantial welfare losses. Given the possibility that weather risks in particular might be further increasing, there is renewed policy attention on improving households' risk management strategies. This article provides an overview of insights learned from recent randomized control trials on predictions coming out of the theoretical literature on households' ex ante risk management. It reveals new puzzles and questions regarding households' inter-temporal decision making under risk, and draws lessons for effective policy design.

Scaling up early childhood development services has the potential to increase children's cognitive and socio-emotional development and promote school readiness in a large segment of the population. This study used a randomized controlled trial approach to evaluate three scaled-up programs designed to widen access to early childhood development services: formal preschools, community preschools, and home-based services. The impacts of all three programs fell short of expectations because of two key flaws in how they were scaled up. First, implementation did not receive due attention; as a result, school facilities were not completed as planned, community-based programs were not always established, and low, irregular stipends created difficulties in hiring and retaining teachers. Second, the services that were available were not promoted and thus not used as widely as anticipated. The results imply that the quality of programs supplied is critical, as is attention to the demand side of the problem. The finding that these programs fell short of expectations does not mean that interventions such as these are ineffective. Rather, it indicates that quality and demand require careful attention in attempts to scale up early childhood development interventions, and any problems should be addressed prior to evaluating effectiveness.

Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs have become the anti-poverty program of choice in many developing countries. Numerous evaluations, often based on rigorous experimental designs, leave little doubt that such programs can increase enrollment and grades attained--in the short term. But evidence is notably lacking on whether these short-term gains translate into longer-term educational benefits needed to fully justify these programs. This paper uses the randomized phase-in of the RPS CCT program in Nicaragua to estimate the long-term effects on educational attainment and learning for boys, measured 10 years after the start of the program. We focus on a cohort of boys aged 9¿12 years at the start of the program in 2000 who, due to the program¿s eligibility criteria and prior school dropout patterns, were likely to have benefitted more in the group of localities that were randomly selected to receive the program first. We find that the short-term program effect of a half grade increase in schooling for boys was sustained after the end of the program and into early adulthood. In addition, results indicate significant and substantial gains in both math and language achievement scores, an approximately one-quarter standard deviation increase in learning outcomes for the now young men. Hence in Nicaragua, schooling and achievement gains coincided, implying important long term returns to CCT programs.

The effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development, labor market outcomes and well-being. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the first 1,000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical development by exploiting a randomized conditional cash transfer (CCT) program in Nicaragua. We find that boys exposed in utero and during the first 2 years of life, have better cognitive, but not physical, outcomes when they are 10 years old compared to those also exposed, but in their second year of life or later. These results confirm that interventions that improve nutrition and/or health during the first 1,000 days of life can have lasting positive impacts on cognitive development for children. The finding that the results differ for cognitive functioning and anthropometrics highlights the importance of explicitly considering cognitive tests, in addition to anthropometrics, when analyzing impacts on early childhood development.