The World Health Organization recommends four antenatal visits for pregnant women in developing countries. Cash transfers have been used to incentivize participation in health services. We examined whether modest cash transfers for participation in antenatal care would increase antenatal care attendance and delivery in a health facility in Kisoro, Uganda. Twenty-three villages were randomized i...

BACKGROUND Social protection interventions, including cash grants and care provision have been shown to effectively reduce some negative impacts of the HIV epidemic on adolescents and families. Less is known about the role of social protection on younger HIV affected populations. This study explored the impact of cash grants on children's cognitive development. Additionally, we examined whether...

We enter meeting ground between two agendas of the heterodox economics programme; the stock-flow-consistent models pioneered by Wynne Godley, and the monetary circuit approach researched in France and Italy. The objective is to present a National Income accounting approach to two innovations in payments mechanisms: deposit-creating institutions and conditional cash transfers.

Heterogeneous Impacts of Conditional Cash Transfers: Evidence from Nicaragua In the last decade, the most popular policy tool used to increase human capital in developing countries has been the conditional cash transfer program. A large literature has shown significant mean impacts on schooling, health, and child labor. This paper examines heterogeneous effects using random-assignment data from...

Maternal and newborn health (MNH) is a high priority for global health and is included among the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). However, the slow decline in maternal and newborn mortality jeopardizes achievements of the targets of MDGs. According to UNICEF, 60 million women give birth outside of health facilities, and family planning needs are satisfied for only 50%. Further, skilled birt...

Parental investments in children can take many forms. It can involve time investments during childhood and adolescence that aid child development, educational investments that improve school quality and hence educational outcomes and cash investments in the form of transfers and bequests. The aim of this paper is to investigate the quantitative significance of these types of investments in driv...

This paper seeks to identify parameter changes which are robust in the sense that they benefit women relative to men in a wide range of household models. The models considered are unitary, Nashbargaining and non-cooperative with and without cash transfers. Reductions in the relative price of ‘female’ consumer goods prices are robust; increases in relative wages are highly non-robust. Increases ...

This article examines the impact of a conditional cash transfer programme in Nicaragua on a range of consumption and productive investment measures. Programme effects are estimated using household panel data collected as part of a randomised evaluation. Despite clear evidence that the programme increased current expenditures, there is only limited evidence that it increased investment. An estim...

Exploiting three Italian earthquakes as quasi-experiments, we analyze the response of homeowners’ consumption to transfers targeted to finance housing reconstruction over time—which, like loans, mainly affect the liquidity of households’ wealth in the short run. We show that transfers that have no effect on consumption over a multi-year horizon, can have significant heterogeneous effects on imp...

The total expenditure on central schemes for the poor and on the major subsidies exceeds the states’ share of central taxes. These schemes are chronic bad performers due to a culture of immunity in public administration and weakened local governments. Arguing that the poor should be trusted to use these resources better than the state, a radical redirection with substantial direct transfers to ...