Essays on economic development

The empirical literature on child labor is replete with a variety of theoretical models that agree on the relationship between child labor and household wealth. Empirical evidence is more mixed. In part this has to do with a lack of agreement on what constitutes child labor and how household wealth is measured. The first chapter of this dissertation re-examines the relationship between household wealth and child labor using a holistic definition of child labor and new measures of household wealth. The findings of this chapter suggest that the strength of the relationship between child labor and household wealth varies greatly depending on (i) how wealth is measured and (ii) the age and gender of the children. For instance, I find that a one standard deviation increase in wealth significantly reduces the daily hours of child labor from as little as 6 percent for young children to as much as 21 percent for girls. As a result, programs that help farmers enhance the value of their assets may help them in generating greater stocks of wealth and thus help reduce the extent of child labor. However, as long as the hours of child labor can be increased at the expense of hours of schooling, such programs must be conditional and targeted to the age and gender of the children.;The second chapter of this dissertation considers the effects of a gender-targeted conditional cash transfer program for girls in classes 6 to 8. It finds that the program is successful in increasing the enrollment of girls in classes 6 to 8 as intended. It also finds evidence to suggest that the program generated positive spillover effects on the enrollment of boys. This success does, however, appear to come at a cost. The student-teacher ratio in treated schools is also climbing. This suggests that in the absence of active steps to address these increasing student-teacher ratios instructional quality is likely to suffer. The success of the program appears to be driven by enrollment increases in urban schools. This suggests the need for a reassessment of targeting criterion in rural schools.;The third chapter delves more deeply into these findings. The results for this chapter suggest that when conditional cash transfers are offered on a gender-targeted basis and girls go to school as a response, the mothers in stipend-eligible households experience substantial reallocations of their time budgets when compared to mothers in households that are ineligible for the transfer. I find that mothers of eligible children in the stipend district experience an increase of 120 minutes of housework per typical school day when compared to mothers of eligible children in the non-stipend district. I find a 100 minute reduction in the amount of time mothers report spending on children's needs. The results suggest no change in the amount of time spent on paid work or sleep. A substantial body of evidence exists on the benefits to society of educating women -- which alone should justify the continuation of this stipend program (with obvious attention being paid to capacity constraints). National data reveal that lower levels of regional literacy are correlated with a substantially higher ratio of boys to girls. If we take this correlation seriously, in the long-run such stipend programs have the potential to impart additional far-reaching benefits to society -- they could well correct this imbalance of sex-ratios. As such, the program should not be abandoned in the name of expediency as has recently been the fate of policies in Pakistan.;Taken together the chapters of this dissertation deepen our understanding of the nuanced outcomes policies for economic development can produce. The choices analysts make in defining outcomes and counterfactuals for comparison are critical inputs in the production of such results.