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.

Although cervical cancer is considered one of the most preventable types of cancer, mortality rates in many developing countries are extremely high. This paper exploits the randomized research design of a large welfare program "PROGRESA" to study the existence of spillover effects in cervical cancer screening in rural Mexico. I find significant evidence of increased demand for Papanicolaou cervical cancer screening among women ineligible for the transfer, yet no evidence of similar externalities in non-gender specific tests, such as blood pressure and blood sugar checks.

This paper presents findings from the Regional Project on Child Development Indicators, PRIDI for its acronym in Spanish. PRIDI created a new tool, the Engle Scale, for evaluating development in children aged 24 to 59 months in four domains: cognition, language and communication, socio-emotional and motor skills. It also captures and identifies factors associated with child development. The Engle Scale was applied in nationally representative samples in four Latin American countries: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Paraguay and Peru.

This paper analyzes gender bias in teaching in low-performing schools in Chile. To carry out the analyses, the authors used videotaped classes for fourth graders and coded 237 tapings. Results show a general (although not uniform) bias in teachers' actions that resulted in less attention to female students. Gender bias had an even greater effect in classrooms where the teachers had worse interactions with students. Results show that less effective teachers (according to the Classroom Assessment Scoring System, or CLASS) show a larger gender bias.

Credit constraints are central to development economics theory. However, there is scant direct evidence that supports the existence of such constraints. Traditional tests observe how consumption changes after an unexpected income shock. Such changes can also result from myopic behavior or precautionary savings. This study uses a randomized control trial to explore the effects of enabling savings as a tool to smooth consumption, keeping income constant. The study focuses on community instructors in Mexico.

Many school systems today are trying to attract top college graduates into teaching, but little is known about what dissuades this target group from entering the profession. This study randomly assigned applicants for a highly-selective alternative pathway into teaching in Argentina either to a survey about their motivations for applying to the program or to surveys that revealed information about their future pay or working conditions.

This paper argues that the assumption of a homogeneous workforce, which is implicitly invoked in the decomposition analysis of changes in welfare indicators, hides the role that schooling and its returns may have on the understanding of these changes. Using Peruvian cross-sectional data for a period of ten years (2004-2013) and counterfactual simulations, this paper finds that the main factor contributing to poverty reduction has been individuals' changes in labor earnings, and the role of these changes has been less important in reducing income inequality.

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as-good-as-random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year, and applied 12 tests of math, language and executive function (EF) at the end of the year. All teachers were filmed teaching for a full day, and the videos were coded using a well-known classroom observation tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (or CLASS).

I review the evidence on access to water and sanitation infrastructure and child outcomes In Latin America. I show that there are large differences in access across countries and, within countries, between households living in urban and rural areas. Many papers in the public health literature show associationsbetween access to clean water sources or improved sanitation, on the one hand, and child outcomes like the incidence of diarrhea or child development, on the other. These papers provide only weak evidence of causality.

Iron deficiency anemia is the most prevalent nutritional deficiency in the world, affecting more than 2 billion people in developing countries. We show that a modest cash transfer substantially reduced anemia among women of reproductive age in rural Ecuador.