We examine women’s household power in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), synthesizing theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence on its measurement, determinants, and consequences. We define women’s household power as their influence over household choices, distinguishing it from broader empowerment concepts. We review economic models, including unitary, collective, and bargaining frameworks, and map these to empirical approaches. We then discuss measurement methods, such as structural estimation of consumption allocation, survey measures, and laboratory experiments. On the determinants of women’s power, we find that some approaches, such as transfers targeted to women, show mixed results, while others, such as increasing women’s control over their earnings, show clearer positive impacts. On the effects of women’s power, we pay special attention to children’s human capital. Few studies provide strong evidence that mothers invest more in children than fathers do, but collectively the evidence suggests such an effect. We conclude by highlighting research and methodological gaps.

A popular environmental policy is to pay forest owners for avoiding deforestation on their land. This is an example of “payments for ecosystem services” (PES). This paper shows that liquidity constraints can limit the effectiveness of PES programs. If an individual would have cut down trees to sell them, his opportunity costs are more front-loaded than the stream of PES income. If credit constrained, he might decline the program even if the net present value (NPV) of the PES income exceeds the NPV of his opportunity costs. I present evidence consistent with this prediction using data on forest owners in Uganda.

Productivity risk is pervasive in underdeveloped countries. This paper highlights a way in which underdevelopment exacerbates productivity risk. Productivity shocks cause larger changes in the wage when workers are poorer, less able to migrate, and more credit‐constrained because of such workers’ inelastic labor supply. This equilibrium wage effect hurts workers. In contrast, it acts as insurance for landowners. Agricultural wage data for 257 districts in India for 1956–87 are used to test the predictions, with rainfall as an instrument for agricultural productivity. In districts with fewer banks or higher migration costs, the wage is much more responsive to fluctuations in productivity.

Theory suggests that longer life expectancy encourages educational investment because a longer time horizon increases the value of investments that pay out over time. To estimate the magnitude of this effect, we examine a sudden drop in maternal mortality in Sri Lanka between 1946 and 1953, which sharply increased the life expectancy of girls. We assess whether girls' education relative to boys' increases more in areas with larger maternal mortality declines. We find that for every extra year of life expectancy, literacy increases by 0.7 percentage points (2%) and years of education increase by 0.11 years (3%).

Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India’s steep birth order gradient is due to favoritism toward eldest sons, which affects parents' fertility decisions and resource allocation across children. We show that, within India, the gradient is steeper for high-son-preference regions and religions. The gradient also varies with sibling gender as predicted. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that India's steeper birth order gradient can explain over one-half of the India-Africa gap in average child height.

Trade sanctions are often criticized as ineffective because they create incentives for evasion or as harmful to the target country's population. Loan sanctions, in contrast, could be self-enforcing and could protect the population from being saddled with “odious debt” run up by looting or repressive dictators. Governments could impose loan sanctions by instituting legal changes that prevent seizure of countries' assets for nonrepayment of debt incurred after sanctions were imposed. This would reduce creditors' incentives to lend to sanctioned regimes. Restricting sanctions to cover only loans made after the sanction was imposed would help avoid time-consistency problems.

Research on intrahousehold decision-making generally finds that fathers have more bargaining power than mothers, but mothers put more weight on children's well-being. This suggests a tradeoff when targeting policies to improve child health: fathers have more power to change household behavior in ways that improve child health, but mothers might have a stronger desire to do so. This paper compares health classes in Uganda that enrolled either mothers or fathers. We find that educating mothers leads to greater adoption of health-promoting behaviors by the household. In addition, educating one parent leads to positive spillovers on the other spouse's health behaviors.

This article examines the effect of cash versus in-kind transfers on local prices. Both types of transfers increase the demand for normal goods; in-kind transfers also increase supply in recipient communities, which could lead to lower prices than under cash transfers. We test and confirm this prediction using a programme in Mexico that randomly assigned villages to receive boxes of food (trucked into the village), equivalently-valued cash transfers, or no transfers. We find that prices are significantly lower under in-kind transfers compared to cash transfers; relative to the control group, in-kind transfers cause a 4% fall in prices while cash transfers cause a positive but negligible increase in prices. In the more economically developed villages in the sample, households’ purchasing power is only modestly affected by these price effects. In the less developed villages, the price effects are much larger in magnitude, which we show is due to these villages being less tied to the outside economy and having less competition among local suppliers.