Public interest litigation in India: overreaching or underachieving?
November 2009
Public interest litigation has historically been an innovative judicial procedure for enhancing the social and economic rights of disadvantaged and marginalized groups in India. This paper finds that public interest litigation cases constitute less than 1 percent of the overall case load. It argues that complaints about public interest litigation related to concerns having to do with separation of powers are better understood as criticisms of the impact of judicial interventions on sector governance. The paper finds that win rates for fundamental rights claims are significantly higher when the claimant is from an advantaged social group than when he or she is from a marginalized group, which constitutes a social reversal, both from the original objective of public interest litigation and from the relative win rates in the 1980s.
Working Paper 5109 

Local-level legal institutions can promote development
November 2009
Local-level, informal legal institutions can support social substitutes for the enforcement of contracts, although these substitutes tend to be limited in range and scale. They are flexible and could be adapted to serve the interests of the poor and marginalized if supportive organizational and social resources could be brought to support the legal claims of the disempowered. They are, however, more likely to support personal integrity rights than the positive liberties that are also constitutive of development as freedom.
Working Paper 5108 

Workers migrating to cities from rural China cause the womenfolk they leave behind to work longer hours on the family farm
October 2009
Left-behind women find the extra hours of farm work either by reducing hours devoted to wage work and family businesses or (in the case of older women) by reducing their leisure time. In general, these time-allocation effects are associated primarily with the migration of offspring as opposed to husbands, and are not reversed when migrants return, with seemingly permanent consequences. No effects on health or empowerment were detected.
Working Paper 5107 

Designing Cost-Effective Cash Transfer Programs to Boost Schooling among Young Women in Sub-Saharan Africa
October 2009
Little is known about how the design of cash transfer programs affects their impacts. This paper presents one-year schooling impacts from a conditional cash transfer experiment among teenage girls and young women in Malawi, and explores how impacts vary depending on the way the program was designed. Overall, the program had large impacts on school attendance: the re-enrollment rate among those who had already dropped out of school before the start of the program increased by two and a half times and the dropout rate among those in school at baseline decreased from 11 to 6 percent. The impacts were similar irrespective of whether cash transfers were conditional on enrollment. When cash sums were given to parents, schooling outcomes were not affected by the program, even for large when transfers. However, when the cash was given directly to the girls, higher transfers were associated with significantly improved school attendance and progress, but only if the transfers were conditional on school attendance.
Working Paper 5090 

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Windfall revenues from both foreign aid and natural resource exports can weaken governments’ incentives to design and maintain efficient tax systems
Summer 2009
This is the sobering conclusion to emerge from research by Stephen Knack, who urges mitigating measures such as ensuring that windfall revenues do not all go to the central government and scaling up donor-financed technical assistance aimed at building revenue-raising capacity.
Research Digest

China’s health system faced considerable challenges at the start of the new Millennium, but recent reforms efforts are on the right tracks
July 2009
A new book by Adam Wagstaff, Magnus Lindelow, Shiyong Wang and Shuo Zhang examines the performance and workings of China’s rural health system leading up to the reforms of the 2000s, outlines the reforms, and presents some early evidence on their impacts. It goes on to outline ideas for building on these reforms to further strengthen China’s rural health system.
Book - Reforming China’s Rural Health System.
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Timing of Evaluations and Duration of Exposure Affect Estimates of Program Impact
Spring 2009
Impact evaluations often ignore the importance of timing and duration.  A study by Elizabeth M. King and Jere R. Behrman cautions that evaluations need to be timed right in order to ensure that impacts are adequately captured. It also argues that duration of exposure can be exploited as a means to measure impacts.
Research Digest

Financial crisis highlights need for more social safety nets, including conditional cash transfers
February 2009
A new book by Ariel Fiszbein and Norbert Schady evaluates CCT programs that offer qualifying families cash in exchange for commitments such as taking babies to health clinics regularly or keeping children in school. It finds that these programs — where the responsibility for breaking out of poverty is shared by the state and poor households — can reduce poverty both in the short and long term, particularly when supported by better public services.
Policy Research Report - Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty.
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