Abstract: Empirical studies of intra-household allocation have revealed that, in many instances, gender is an important determinant in the allocation of resources within the household. Yet, within the theoretical literature, why gender matters within the household remains an open question. In this paper, we propose a simple model of intra-household allocation based on a particular social institution for the organization of agricultural production practiced among certain ethnic groups in West Africa. We highlight how this institution, while resolving certain problems of commitment and informational asymmetry, can also lead to a gendered pattern in the allocation of productive resources and consumption within the household. Using a survey of agricultural households in Burkina Faso, we show, consistent with this theory, that plots owned by the head of the household are farmed more intensively, and achieves higher yields, than plots with similar characteristics owned by other household members. Male and female family members who do not head the household achieve similar yields. We argue that the higher yields achieved by the household head may be explained in terms of social norms that require him to spend the earnings from some plots under his control exclusively on household public goods, which in turn provides other family members the incentive to voluntarily contribute labor on his farms. Using expenditures data, and measures of rainfall to capture weather-related shocks to agricultural income, we show that the household head has, indeed, a higher marginal propensity to spend on household public goods than other household members. The fact that the head of the household is usually male accounts for the gendered pattern in labor allocation and yields across different farm plots.

Abstract: People living with HIV/AIDS in Africa are among the most vulnerable because of the debilitating effect of the illness, which prevents them from having an income-generating activity. As highly active anti-retroviral treatments are developed, and access to this therapy scaled-up, they are able to improve their health to a point of living a normal life. The treatment, however, requires to be taken in certain conditions, such as after a nutritious meal, and can be costly in terms of travel to the health facility, even if the drug regimen is subsidized. In this context, the impact of a food crisis on welfare, and in particular, on food consumption, can have a very negative impact of adherence to treatment and health outcomes. To test this hypothesis, we use data from a longitudinal survey carried out in Mozambique in 2007 and 2008, which was designed to include households with HIV positive individuals as well as comparison households with no identified HIV positive members. Food grain prices have risen by 150% between January 2006 and June 2008, with about 40% of that rise that occurred in just the first half of 2008. We find that, as a likely effect of the food crisis, there has been a real deterioration of welfare in terms of income, food consumption and nutritional status in Mozambique between 2007 and 2008, among both HIV and comparison households. However, HIV households have not suffered more from the crisis than others. We conjecture that initiation of treatment and better services in the health facilities have counter-balanced the effect of the crisis by improving the health of patients and their labor force participation.

Abstract: We use health facility level survey which was administered to health staff and outpatients to assess healthcare quality, and evaluate the extent to which health care quality is related to costs, and whether costs and quality differ for HIV/AIDS related patients. We measure health care quality by patients’ self-reported satisfaction and a vignette score assessing the quality of healthcare practices.  We find that consulting for HIV-related services, while not more costly to patients significantly increases the quality of care received. Consulting for HIV/AIDS also increases substantially the time spent waiting to be served. The wealth of patients does not affect care quality, but helps in reducing waiting time, in particular for HIV patients. Our findings are robust to controlling for health facility level fixed effects.

Abstract: This paper uses a prospective randomized trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on health and education outcomes for children from low-income households in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two school feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand, school meals where students are provided with lunch each school day, and, on the other hand, take home rations which provide girls with 10 kg of cereal flour each month, conditional on 90 percent attendance rate. After the program ran for one academic year, both programs increased girls’ enrollment by 5 to 6 percentage points.  While there was no observable significant impact on raw scores on mathematics, the time-adjusted scores on mathematics improved slightly for girls.  The interventions caused absenteeism to increase in households who are low in child labor supply while absenteeism decreased for households which have a relatively large child labor supply, consistent with the labor constraints.  Finally, for younger siblings of beneficiaries, aged between 12 and 60 months, take-home rations have increased weight-for-age by .38 standard deviations and weight-for-height by .33 standard deviations.  In contrast, school meals did not have any significant impact on the nutrition of younger children.
Also available as a World Bank Policy Research Working  Paper

Abstract: There is a large literature which explores how negative income shocks impact human capital accumulation (especially education) when financial markets are incomplete and households can neither insure nor borrow to smooth their consumption. The main conclusion is that households in these circumstances allocate child time to more labor and to less schooling. Such ex-post use of child time as a self insurance mechanism translates into lower human capital (lower years of education completed) over time which is detrimental to economic growth. There has been, however, little research on the cumulative effects of (perceived) income uncertainty on child education. The intuition is that households that face more a volatile income stream have greater incentives to build up a buffer stock to insure against unforeseen adverse shocks, and non enrollment can be part of such strategy. This paper fills this gap on the literature which focuses on income shocks and education in developing countries. The empirical work uses data from rural Burkina Faso, an environment where school enrollment rates are low and households face frequent income shocks. Controlling for current economic shocks, household wealth levels and child characteristics, I find that income uncertainty (expressed as income variance) consistently reduces a number of education outcomes, including current enrollment status, education expenditures per child, the number of years of education completed and the probability of having been ever enrolled. The estimation results suggest that income uncertainty might have large welfare costs in terms of human capital.