This dissertation examines two policies that affect women's education, bargaining power, son preference, and awareness of domestic violence in developing countries. The first chapter evaluates a conditional cash transfer program in Bangladesh to identify its impact on the education of multiple generations and explores the pathways behind the…

Single mothers have the lowest rates of degree completion of any demographic group when they pursue higher education as a path out of poverty. This article explores the obstacles student mothers face when they pursue higher education. The lived experiences of participants add context to data about low rates of degree completion. Findings are based…

As immigration has reached historic numbers in the United States, immigrant children have become an integral part of the national tapestry. While immigration has grown across all post-industrial nations, inequality has risen at a steep rate on a variety of indicators, including income distribution, child poverty, residential segregation, and…

Part 1 provides evidence, drawing on Statistics Canada reports, that Canadians without a high-school certificate are most at-risk of unemployment, low earnings, and poverty. Young adults are especially hard hit, with significantly higher unemployment rates and lower average earnings than high-school graduates. Part 2 cites research that shows the…

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers, and the promotion of competition are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school…

On the basis of official statistics, poverty has halved in Ghana over the period from 1991 to 2005. Our objective in this paper is to assess how far this fall was linked to the creation of better paying jobs and the increase in education. We find that earnings rose rapidly in the period from 1998 to 2005, by 64% for men and by 55% for women. While…

Families who live in poverty face disadvantages that can hinder their children's development in many ways, write Greg Duncan, Katherine Magnuson, and Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal. As they struggle to get by economically, and as they cope with substandard housing, unsafe neighborhoods, and inadequate schools, poor families experience more stress in…

The Millennium Development Goals launched in 2001 provide a worldwide agenda to reduce poverty by 2015. Though the eight goals provide synergies for the rapid reduction of poverty, the MDGs have come under criticism for being too narrow and sometimes leaving out critical aspects of human development and well-being. Although the MDGs address some…

Current U.S. policy initiatives to improve the U.S. education system, including No Child Left Behind, test-based evaluation of teachers and the promotion of competition, are misguided because they either deny or set to the side a basic body of evidence documenting that students from disadvantaged households on average perform less well in school…

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs link public transfers to human capital investment in hopes of alleviating current poverty and reducing its intergenerational transmission. However, little is known about their long-term impacts. This paper evaluates longer-run impacts on schooling and work of the best-known CCT program, Mexico's…

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have spread worldwide as a new form of social assistance for the poor. Previous evaluations of CCT programs focus mainly on rural settings, and little is known about their effects in urban areas. This paper studies the short-term (1- and 2-year) effects of the Mexican "Oportunidades" CCT program…

Discusses characteristics of counties with high poverty rates--sparser population, larger proportion of poor and most poverty-prone populations, less educated population, greater reliance on transfer payments, and higher proportions of income from farming. Suggests that government assistance in the form of income transfers could help alleviate…

This report examined the economic and demographic characteristics of infants and toddlers, how these characteristics changed between 1980 and 1990, and the percentage of the infant and toddler population served by federal early childhood programs. This examination of census and other data found that during the 1980s, the number of poor infants and…

Since its creation in 1991, the Peruvian Social Fund (FONCODES) has spent about $570 million funding micro-projects throughout the country. Many of these projects have involved the construction and renovation of school facilities, mainly primary schools in rural areas. FONCODES projects are driven by community demand and targeted using an index of…

Five papers which criticize Charles Murray's book, "Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980" are presented in this report. In general, the papers dispute Murray's thesis that the poor did not benefit from social policies but were, instead, substantially harmed by these programs. The papers (and their authors) are: (1)…