The World Bank and others maintain that the major mechanism for improving nutrition in poor communities is increases in income. Aggregate estimates of food expenditure are consistent with such a possibility, implying income/expenditure elasticities close to one. However, the high degree of aggregation at which such estimates are made means that the considerable increase in price per nutrient as income increases is ignored, and the nutrient elasticities are therefore overstated. Estimates for a rural south Indian sample indicate that this bias is considerable and that the true nutrient elasticities with respect to income may be close to zero.

Nonexperimental data are used to evaluate impacts of a Bolivian preschool program on cognitive, psychosocial, and anthropometric outcomes. Impacts are shown to be highly dependent on age and exposure duration. To minimize the effect of distributional assumptions, program impacts are estimated as nonparametric functions of age and duration. A generalized matching estimator is developed and used to control for nonrandom selectivity into the program and into exposure durations. Comparisons with three groups—children in the feeder area not in the program, children in the program for ≤ 1 month, and children living in similar areas without the program—indicate that estimates are robust for significant positive effects of the program on cognitive and psychosocial outcomes with ≥ 7 months' exposure, although the age patterns of effects differ slightly by comparison group.

The authors assess the impact of college quality on women's earnings and the influence of family and individual endowments on college choice using new data from a survey of identical and nonidentical twins born in Minnesota. The estimates reject models that ignore school choice. The statistically preferred estimates suggest that Ph.D.-granting, private universities with well-paid senior faculty and smaller enrollments produce students who have significantly higher earnings later in life. Both the quantity of schooling and the quality of schooling resources are allocated to higher-endowed individuals, which exacerbates preexisting inequality in human capital and biases conventional estimates of school quality effects.

03 We show how comparisons between the within-twin correlations of human capital outcomes across identical and nonidentical twins can be used to identify the variability in the individual-specific component of endowments and the responsiveness of schooling to individual-specific endowments in the family and in the marriage market even when schooling is measured with error. Estimates from two twins samples indicate that 27 (42) percent of the variance in log earnings (obesity) is due to variability in individual-specific endowments, allocations of schooling reinforce specific endowments, and individual-specific earnings endowments of men and their wives' schooling are negatively associated.

That fluctuations in primary commodity export markets have significant impacts on the economies of the producing countries is intuitively clear and widely accepted. But there is little consensus on the direction and significance of these impacts on economic development. Fluctuations in the value of primary commodity production and exports have the potential for affecting the growth path through a number of channels. This paper is concerned with delineating these channels of influence and with establishing quantitative dimensions for their effects. As an illustration we focus on coffee in relation to the economy of Brazil. The relationships between the coffee producing sector and the national economy are established econometrically and integrated into a macro model of the Brazilian economy. Alternative scenarios for coffee production and exports illustrate the nature of the impacts throughout the economy and the potential effects on Brazilian growth.

This study isolates the causal effects of financial literacy and schooling on wealth accumulation using a new household dataset and an instrumental variables (IV) approach. Financial literacy and schooling attainment are both strongly positively associated with wealth outcomes in linear regression models, whereas the IV estimates reveal even more potent effects of financial literacy. They also indicate that the schooling effect only becomes positive when interacted with financial literacy. Estimated impacts are substantial enough to imply that investments in financial literacy could have large wealth payoffs.

This paper evaluates the impact of three different performance incentive schemes using data from a social experiment that randomized 88 Mexican high schools with over 40,000 students into three treatment groups and a control group. Treatment 1 provides individual incentives for performance on curriculum-based mathematics tests to students only, treatment 2 to teachers only, and treatment 3 gives both individual and group incentives to students, teachers, and school administrators. Program impact estimates reveal the largest average effects for treatment 3, smaller impacts for treatment 1, and no impact for treatment 2.

The hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution India. Estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the Indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect, combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men, importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution.